


on the nature of surfacing

by elevenhurricanes



Series: we were always an island [3]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Child Neglect, Demons, Demons?, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Season/Series 02, Psychic Abilities, Suicidal themes (mentioned), Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-11-20 20:11:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 73,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18131513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elevenhurricanes/pseuds/elevenhurricanes
Summary: In which Alex learns there are doors to be unlocked and opened (and how to go about it).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In which I take Simon’s discussion of doors and run with it: the story.  
> Please note this story is complete and will be updated weekly.  
> I will put a generic warning at the beginning of certain chapters to heed certain tags.
> 
> Also: enjoy!

 

The first item on Alex’s Christmas list is going to be a new pair of sneakers.  

Her current ones, which used to be a light blue, are now the same color as her dog – who, incidentally, is the reason she’ll be needing the new shoes. She’s not sure why she’d given in to Relay’s interest in sniffing around the lake’s marshy banks, but she had. Then she’d looked up to admire the yellow leaves on the birch tree above her and down she had gone into the muck, thanks to a squirrel hidden in the bushes. A couple had stopped to check on her, the older woman having no qualms about helping her clean off the mud on the backs of her thighs. Another jogger had wandered by, offering nothing more than a friendly nod, which Alex was thankful for. She didn’t particularly want a crowd of people to help wipe mud off her ass.  

With each wet slap of her shoes, she regrets admiring the trees, though it doesn’t stop her from doing so again as they make their way back home.  

October in Seattle is always her favorite. The trees are dipped in cherry-red and honey-yellow, pale orange and rich magenta. It’s the last month before the serious rainfall starts back up, before she has to dig the heavy-duty, tartan-print rain coat out of the hall closet. For now, October deals out an easy drizzle. It’s enough for her simple rain jacket to handle as she cuts sharp on the path and emerges out into the university’s parking lot. The horticulture buildings are all closed-up for the weekend. Only a few parking spots are taken; Alex would bet most of them are students who parked last night to attend the football game (and the keggers that followed – of which she has several embarrassing memories of attending when she was in college here).  

They make it to her little bungalow in the University District just as the drizzle shifts into a proper downpour. She’s thankful for the covered porch that shelters her as she holds Relay back with her leg.

“Hey, hey, hey, not so fast,” she tells him as he squirms to get inside the house. “Show me those paws, buddy.”  

After a good rub with a towel, he snatches it from her and dances around, shaking the towel at her until she caves to a game of tug-of-war. Ten minutes pass before her phone trills in her pocket. She uses the sudden noise against him, yanking the towel from his mouth.

“Hello there,” she greets, before she’s bowled over by seventy pounds of damp dog.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Strand asks, and she realizes how breathy she sounds.

“I’m getting my ass kicked in tug-of-war.”

“Oh. Well, I was wondering if you’d like to join me today. I’m driving down to Olympia to look over a case.”  

Alex gets an arm out and tosses the muddy towel down the hallway, hoping against hope that it doesn’t land on the rug. She stands as Relay snatches the towel up and carries it back over.

“Which one?” she asks.  

“A new one. Ruby forwarded me the info on Thursday. I forgot to mention it to you yesterday.”

Her thoughts immediately drift to yesterday, which involved them digging through the dusty boxes in his living room, and then two bottles of wine, and all conversation was funneled into other (and more fun) activities. “It involves a mystical stretch of road in Olympia that leads to a tunnel, where it’s claimed that people disappear out of thin air.”

“Wow. A mystical road _and_ a spooky tunnel.”

“Supposedly mystical, of course.”

“Well, of course,” she teases and hears that answering chuckle. Putting the phone on speaker, she moves to the short adjoining hallway, stripping off the wet jogging gear as she goes.

“Dress warm.”  

As if she hasn’t been outside in the last week.

“Give me twenty minutes,” she says while she starts the shower. The warm steam is like a salve to her chilled skin, pulling a contented hum out of her.

“What’s that sound?”

“The shower. Which I’m about to get in. Though… my phone is waterproof. I can stay on the line, if you’d like to give me the details. Or we can Facetime.”   

“Oh, no – that’s fine. You can look over the file on the drive down.” She smirks to herself as she imagines him squirming in that executive office chair of his, still surprised how sheepish he can be, despite being whatever they are for a few months. “I’m leaving now. I’ll see you soon.”

 

\------

 

Phantom Pass is a stretch of road that winds along the cliffs of Lake Holston, which sits along Capitol State Forest’s southern edge. In the 1940s, the road was built to replace the old highway that was lost when the government flooded the valley to build Holston Dam. Soil erosion and dwindling budgets halted the road’s construction, though, and by the eighties it was clear that the state was no longer interested in the upkeep. The project was declared complete.  

With only six miles paved out of the planned twenty, the road dead-ends to a tunnel that hikers use for a trailhead and teenagers use for a canvas. And, as with most abandoned structures in small, forgotten towns, there's the urban legend. 

“So, if you drive through the tunnel some mysterious force makes you… what? Disappear?” Alex asks as she skims the documents.

Strand hums. “Or your car stalls halfway through. Or you get sent back to the beginning of the tunnel.”

“Or your car gets teleported to the nearby cliffside and you end up in the lake,” she adds, reading over the police report.

“Back in the sixties, locals used to push junkyard cars off the cliff for fun. When the water level is low you can see them. So, people started making up stories for how they got there. It’s an urban legend,” Strand explains. “Like the one about the ghost children pushing cars over railroad tracks in Texas – it’s a colorful story, but it’s just that. A story.”

The video, when she watches it, isn’t something she would call ‘colorful.’

It starts out inside the cab of a pickup, the camera aimed out the front window. Up ahead, the tunnel is a yawning hole, the weak sunlight only reaching a few feet inside. Trees sprout from above, their branches collecting the dead leaves of autumn’s beginning. More leaves are piled next to the entrance, once orange, but now a muddy brown. The mouth of the tunnel is slick, polished to a shine by the rain. Wipers squeal across the windshield, smearing the glass in time with the rock song that plays on the radio.

“ _C’mon Lucas, let’s get it over with!_ ” the camera operator shouts, following with an equally loud jeer.  

The video whirls to Lucas, a sandy-haired boy who grins as he revs the engine before letting off the brake. Tires squeal across the wet pavement. The pickup lurches forward, the engine roaring as the darkness of the tunnel closes over them. The headlights can only illuminate a few feet ahead. Graffiti and drawings are just quick glimpses of shapes and letters, everything melting into a blur as the truck blazes past. The pinprick of light at the end stretches as they hoot and holler. Two dots lengthen into people, standing on either side of the exit. The headlights shine against a large piece of graffiti on the ground.  

“ _My brother was such a pussy–_ ”

The darkness vanishes suddenly as open sky fills the windshield. The boys scream as the truck tips forward and the video becomes a blur of blue and black and gray, the water and the dashboard and the rocky cliffside all melting together as the video whirls and spins; a loud smack rattles the cab as the pickup slams into the water and metal groans as the cab fills up with water and the boys panic because the doors won’t open and the windows won’t break and the video stutters here, just pixelated blurs and terrified voices before it cuts to black.     

Alex turns her phone over and sucks in a breath.

“How did you get this?”

“The boy filming was streaming it live to social media. His friends saved it and reposted it on various platforms. The parents keep trying to get the video taken down, but once something is on the internet, it’s usually there forever.”

“Are they the ones who contacted you?”

“Yes.” Strand sighs. “Grief makes people do questionable things. They seem to believe the video and the reports from the other two friends.”

“The ones who were standing at the end of the tunnel.”

“Yes.”  

Strand glances over at her in the passenger seat, where the folder bends under her grip as she stares resolutely out the window. Brief stretches of railroad track appear between the spruce trees that line the interstate. They seem to have left the rain behind in Seattle, though clouds still linger above. Reaching across the console, he lays a hand on her arm and brushes his fingers across the soft skin of her wrist. He watches a sigh work its way through her as she shifts and settles.

“Did you send the video to one of your experts?”

“Since the video I was sent couldn’t be verified as the original, they had trouble discerning whether or not it had been tampered with. Still, they lean towards it being altered in some way.”

“That still doesn’t explain how they got that truck down to the cliff.”

“Determined and stupid sometimes go hand-in-hand.”

Alex shakes her head. “I mean, with the terrain and the rocks. From these photos, it looks like you could get an ATV down there, but I don’t see the truck making it down.”

It did, though. Because clipped in with the police report is a stack of photos that show the aftermath. Portions of the tailgate and bumper stick out of the water, the license plate a white smudge under the surface. There are shots from after the retrieval: the front end a crushed soda can, the metal bent and twisted into mean angles, the windshield gone. Whether that’s from the force of the truck hitting the rocks or from the emergency responders trying to get to the teens, she doesn’t know.

Behind the photographs are a few articles on the wreck, ranging from _Authorities identify 2 teens who drowned in Lake Holston_ to _Phantom Pass Curse Strikes Again!!_

Both articles feature the same cropped photo of Lucas Miller and Ryan Cabaniss grinning at the camera.   

 

\------

 

The tunnel looks much the same as it did in the year-old video. They park in the lot for Phantom Creek Trail and walk to the bollards that span the width of the road, twenty feet in front of the tunnel. Although they would prevent Strand’s car from making it around, any vehicle with four-wheel drive would easily be able to.  

It’s certainly foreboding, staring down the mouth of it, the darkness so thick inside it’s like a wall. It could almost be a painting, and when Alex reaches out to touch it, her hand could meet solid stone. There’s enough daylight passing through the clouds to see the end, but everything between is a blackened mystery. As if on cue, she hears the soft hiss of rain as it moves towards them from the southwest, a flickering blur over the treetops. Strand passes her a flashlight and they head inside.  

The curved walls are decorated in graffiti, a lively spread of peace signs and racial slurs, inverted pentacles and offers for sex. They pass several painted doors, one of which encourages a look into the drawn peephole to _see into the other side!_  

Alex continues without following the instructions because she doesn’t want to press her face against damp rock for a joke. It’s certainly not because she might actually see something.       

“Looks like your friend Simon has been here,” Strand says, the words echoing down the tunnel. Alex follows to where his light is pointed at the wall. Inside a set of double circles is a pentagram.

“What are those lines inside the center, though?” She lifts a hand and traces the air above the drawing, which seem to shape a deformed letter E.

“I believe that’s the Aquarius constellation.”

“Look who’s brushed up on their astronomy.” She grins at his answering scoff.  

Moving her light from the symbol, she passes over another painted door and finds another symbol, this time of a dagger wrapped in thorns, once again inside a double circle. Another below it looks like a Rubik’s cube, and another off to the right seems to be a pilcrow combined with the flag of an eighth note. As far as her light can illuminate, more and more symbols appear along the walls. A cold breeze filters through the tunnel, replacing the stagnant air with a lingering chill. The hairs on the back of her neck raise in response.

Strand starts taking photos of the drawings, muttering about sending them off to a colleague at Fordham. Alex is too busy searching for more symbols to chastise him for speaking too low for her recorder to catch. She thinks back to the video and the graffiti she’d seen on the pavement for the split second it was illuminated, right before the truck went over the cliff.

Several hundred feet later, her light finally locates the symbol’s edge. Nearly six feet in diameter, the image is set in two circles, and seems to be two crescent moons facing each other. Between the moons are two triangles stacked on top of each other, the top one smaller than the bottom. There’s a soft whistling noise that she attributes to the wind that blows stronger now.

“Does this look familiar to you?” she raises her voice so the question will reach Strand, who is still back where she left him.

The flash of his camera goes off again as he answers her, but the words all slide together into echoing nonsense. She’s about to reply that she can’t understand anything he’s saying, when she realizes that’s probably what he was telling her. Instead, she resorts to flashing her light at him until it catches his attention, and from down the tunnel comes that familiar scoff. Satisfied that he’s heading her way, she turns and hunches down to study the image, reaching out to trace the thick lines.   

The air snaps around her like a rubber band. It’s like someone tore the tunnel away and turned on the overhead light as the world around her becomes an overcast day. She stumbles, dizzy with the sudden change, and steps on some loose stones that slide under her sudden weight and give, skittering across and over the cliffside, where the lake stretches out before her.    

“What the fuck?” Alex blurts out as she scrambles back from the cliffside.

Brambles snag at her coat as she shoves through a thicket and over a rocky outcropping. Rain drips from the branches above her, the heels of her boots sinking into the soft earth. The pressure in her head and the fine layer of sweat on her skin could be blamed on the impromptu climb, but there’s also the issue that she doesn’t remember how she got down to the cliff.

The last thing she does remember is looking at that symbol on the ground and then – well, then.

From far above comes her name. Her head snaps up to scan the tree line high above. Between a cluster of pines is a flash of gray that she races towards, calling Strand’s name until he steps out from behind the trees.

“I look away for ten seconds and you disappear on me. What are you doing down here?” he asks as she approaches.  

Her chest is tight from the climb, but she continues up the hill until she reaches him. Taking in her condition, Strand loops an arm around her waist and settles her down on a nearby log. Crouching in front of her, he takes her hands in between his own and rubs warmth back into them.  

“What were you doing down there?” he asks again, his brows drawn down.    

“I have no idea,” Alex admits, holding his gaze, her hackles rising when he raises one of those brows. “I don’t. The last thing I remember is being in the tunnel, waiting on you to come look at that symbol I found, and then I was down at the cliffs.” She shifts against the log and scans the woods to avoid his gaze. “It’s almost like… like I teleported there or something.”

“Alex–” he starts but she waves at him to hush.

“My recorder – I had it running when we were in the tunnel. Maybe…” she trails off as she stops the recorder and rewinds.

 _“Does this look familiar to you?”_ comes her own voice, followed by her footsteps as she shuffles around the symbol. There’s a soft rumble where Strand replied to her, her soft chuckle when he scoffed at her flashlight. The audio crackles and Alex wonders if her hand brushed against it.

 _“What the fuck?”_ comes her voice again. Her breath catches. She rewinds again to watch the elapsed time tick by, her hand starting to shake when only eight seconds separate her chuckle and her exclamation at the cliff. She shows the proof to Strand, who explains it away with a software malfunction.

“I don’t know what’s more concerning,” he continues. “The fact that you probably blacked out and don’t remember walking down to the cliff, or that you believe in this preposterous story.”

Yanking her hands from his grip, she stands abruptly.

“Come on, then,” she orders as she heads up the hill, Strand at her heels.

“I’m just concerned–”

“You can be concerned later, after we’ve tested my theory.”

“Your theory?”

“You’re a man of science,” Alex snaps as they break through the tree line and reach the asphalt patches where the road ends, the tunnel looming ahead of them. “We’re going to conduct an experiment.”

“Alex–” he starts again, biting off his words when she heads for the tunnel’s mouth. He obediently follows until they reach the large symbol that’s been painted on the ground, the one he barely gave more than a cursory glance at earlier when he realized Alex had disappeared on him. It was like being in that dark hallway at Prestwick all over again, calling for her, endlessly waiting on a response that never came.

“Stay there,” she instructs, pointing to a few feet away from the symbol. “Now, keep your eyes on me.”  

His gaze is fixed on hers as she steps backward onto the image. There’s that tingle at the base of her neck that she felt before and blamed on the chill of the tunnel. Strand shifts his shoulders and she can tell he’s about to make some smartass remark. She opens her mouth to cut him off when the world falls away again, replaced by the cliffside view of the lake.

It stretches out before her, still and quiet, as if it’s been drawn onto the earth with graphite. She takes a few steps back from the edge, watching the ground for any more loose rocks when she sees it. Covered in a fine layer of pine needles and pebbles is the same symbol in the same pair of circles, drawn onto the rough limestone. Leaning down, she brushes the debris from it and puts her fingers to it. That same tingle travels up her fingers, dancing along the tendons in her wrist, as if they were violin strings being plucked. Shadows fold over her as she blinks to readjust her vision to the tunnel’s interior. Standing a few feet away is Strand, who stares at her, his eyes stretched wide behind his glasses.

“You – you disappeared.” He swallows, opens his mouth to say something else, then swallows again.

Alex drags in a slow breath, trying to calm her racing heart. “I know.”   

“That’s impossible.”

“I know,” she repeats as she steps back from the symbol. They both watch as it fades from the cracked pavement.

“This must be a – a trick of some kind.”  

They hold each other’s gaze for a beat.   

“I think I need to make a phone call.”

 

\------

 

Ignoring Strand’s protests, Alex leaves the voicemail. She doesn’t state the exact reason for her call. The voicemail is more bait than anything, to see if Simon will respond to the cryptic message. And if the number is registered with someone else, she’ll just sound like a friend with a juicy secret to tell.

“I don’t see how garnering the opinion from a mentally ill person – who, by the way, believes that playing a special tune will let people see demons – will help your case that what happened back there was supernatural.”

Despite the afternoon traffic, Strand remains firmly on his apophenia-branded soapbox through the entire drive from Olympia back to her house. Eager to get inside and get on her laptop, she avoids taking the bait and hops out of the car when he pulls up to the curb. Following her inside, he sees to making tea while she sinks her teeth into Google.

Twenty-three tabs later, a cup of tea is placed next to her on the side table.

She hears Strand talking in low tones to Relay, hears the jingle of the leash as he clips it on, the squeal of the front door as they head out for a walk. They return at some point between tab eleven and tab fifteen, smelling of fresh rain and chicken saagwala. The latter appears on a plate at her elbow, which she eats as she transfers three library books to her Kindle and scans through a website on liminal spaces. An interactive map at the bottom shows places they’ve been reported: a truck stop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; a back alley in Boca Raton, Florida; a tunnel in Kingsport, Tennessee; a defunct theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A sister website declares Washington as ‘the land of a thousand liminal spaces,’ where the veil between worlds is thin and stretchy.  

“I have that eight-a.m. class tomorrow,” Strand reminds her at some point, after he’s turned off the television and urged Relay off his lap. “But I want you to wake me if Simon wants to meet with you tonight.”

She glances up from the laptop screen, surprised to see that evening has fallen. Her living room is lit only by the corner lamp and what light pours in from the kitchen. A glance at the front windows shows that the blinds have been shut – something she always tries to do before night comes, ever since she had that nightmare about the skeletal creatures in her yard. The same nightmare Strand had to coax her to wake up from last month.

Her facial expression must betray her inner impulsive journalist because he repeats the request in his no-nonsense voice (though she’s chosen to ignore it several times throughout their partnership). “I’m serious,” he says, as if reading her thoughts, before he disappears into the bedroom.

Later, when her dry eyes and throbbing wrists force her to call it a night, she slips into bed beside him. Watching him for a moment, she rests a hand on his arm and runs her fingers over the soft fabric of his shirt, the one she reorganized the dresser for so he could have his own drawer.  

It’s certainly surprised her, how easily they fell into this part-time co-habitation together. She always pictured him as a lone wolf, shying away from companionship; the king left to his lonesome tower, surrounded by his moat of dusty boxes and childhood trauma.    

He snuffles in his sleep, twisting his body like a cat in the sun. His hand comes up, fingers clumsily catching at hers.

“’dee call?”

“No,” she whispers back, the hour too late for anything else. “He didn’t call. Go back to sleep.”

“’m sorry that I,” his grip tightens around hers as he sighs, “that I can’t believe like you do.”

Alex mulls over how she wants to reply to that, knowing that they’re no longer talking about the phone call. Strand keeps quiet and patiently waits. His thumb makes gentle brushes over her fingers, the movement stuttering in the dips of her knuckles as sleep threatens to pull him back under.

“I understand.”

“I know you do.”  

The bed dips and whines as he rolls on his side to face her, to run sleepy fingers through her hair and press a kiss against her hairline. She gives in and tucks herself into his chest. Sleep is a string that tugs at her until she relents, feeling him breathe steadily against her as she closes her eyes against the dark.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terms/allusions: 
> 
> Phantom Pass is inspired by a hybrid of the Road to Nowhere in Bryson City, NC and Point 19 on Norris Lake in Anderson County, TN. 
> 
> One of the images being a dagger wrapped in thorns is a nod to Victoriocity, a steampunk podcast about Victorian London that I highly recommend, if that's your thing. I love one (1) Archibald Fleet.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, if you're the kind of person who enjoys listening to writers' self-indulgent playlists, I've made one for this story linked [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1218893475/playlist/405sFmfo5HqhCpEr6rOudH?si=5hGxbXNXRditc4KoXxUx3Q).


	2. Chapter 2

The PNWS office is bustling by lunchtime on Monday.  

Interns rush up and down the hallways with copy paper and drink carriers, headphones dangling from their arms as they fill up the narrow corridors with their whispered apologies as they run into open doors and other people.

Alex shuts her door against the noise as she returns from an early lunch of coffee and a muffin from the shop down the street. Sitting on her desk is a manila folder. The note taped to the top is covered in that familiar, academic scrawl.

_Alex –_

_Found some more information on shared delusions for you to look over._

_R.S._

She rolls her eyes and tosses the note into the trash.

“Can I have a muffin?” asks a voice.  

Alex whirls, her hand brandishing the only thing she has for a weapon right now. The pen wobbles slightly in her grip.

Simon Reese unfolds himself from the shadow of her bookcase. Over his shoulder is a pentagram within a double circle, drawn onto the wall. For a young man who makes his living escaping mental institutions and leaving mysterious voicemails, he certainly doesn’t look the part. He’s dressed in denim jeans and a Keep Portland Weird T-shirt underneath a wool cardigan, playing the role of the tourist well. There’s something in his demeanor that Alex can’t quite put a finger on – it makes her think of those Renaissance paintings where the artist has hidden something in the shadows, just out of the viewer’s sight.     

“Sure,” she agrees, setting the to-go bag on her desk and switching on her recorder. “As long as you have something to clean that drawing off my wall.”

“Your boyfriend is stupid.”

Alex can’t tell if he’s dodging the question about the unwanted graffiti, or if this is a normal conversational segue for him.

“Occasionally, yes.”

“He’ll come around, though,” Simon says with that strange finality of his.  

She hovers next to her office chair and watches him circle the room. He pokes at the items on her bookshelves, reading the titles as he chews on a blueberry muffin.  

“Is this a good book?” He points to a novel on the shelf.

“I think so.”

“‘I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul.’”  

It takes her a moment to realize he’s quoting the book in question.

“Why would you ask if you’ve already read it?”

“I don’t think I have yet.”

“What does that mean?”

Simon doesn’t bother answering, and instead moves to the photo frames on the far wall.

Professional shots of the PNWS team; candid photos of holiday parties, business functions, and that one memorable camping trip to Olympic National Park: they all hang together in cheap, plastic black frames. There’s even a photo of Strand and her, taken by a photographer for the _Times_ for a story they did on the podcast. They’re standing together on his front porch, the backyard’s fir trees creating a solid background, shielding them from the overcast skies. With Strand in his white button-down and slacks and her in her cable-knit sweater and jeans, they look like a splash of fresh paint against the gray house, or a sea spray against a cliff.

The article ran in the Lifestyles section with the headline: _Pursuing the Paranormal: Journalist and Skeptic Series a Hit!_

The photo wasn’t the one the paper went with. Instead, they used one from inside Strand’s house, the two of them surrounded by file stacks and tapes and other props the photographer pulled from Strand’s desk (much to his obvious displeasure). The porch photo looked ‘too BHG,’ according to the photographer they sent back. They wanted something grittier, and clearly a photo with more noise than the last.  

But the paper obliged when she requested a copy of the porch photo.  

Though she did have to borrow Nic’s laptop to photoshop out the dark blur that seemed to linger a little too close, which Strand claimed was a result of the photographer’s lackadaisical lens cleaning habits. Alex then kept the laptop a little longer to photoshop Strand’s diploma from Yale to say _Master of Ignorance in Skepticism_ , which she (and her Twitter followers) found very funny. Strand pretended that he didn’t, but she caught that wry smile (and the notification of him favoriting the tweet).

“There are many things you don’t understand.” Simon turns away from the photo wall and looks over her with a clinical gaze. “Or maybe you do.”

“I called you–”

“Because you used my door."

Her train of thought derails at his interruption. “What door? What are you talking about?”

“As always, Alex,” he murmurs, flopping down in the chair in front of her desk, “you see but you do not observe.”

“Been watching a lot of TV with your newfound freedom, then?”  

He smiles at her, a quick thing, before his expression melts back to blank. “At the hospital,” he clarifies. “I opened my door and you stepped inside and went ahead, but only long enough to matter. Not really long enough to notice.”

“Are you talking about at Three Rivers? When we first met, when you spoke to me about how I got into the building?” Alex holds her hands up in a placating gesture when he sighs in frustration. “I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re not making any sense.”

“At the _other_ hospital. The one you visited with your doctor.”

It takes another moment, but she finally realizes he’s talking about that room, the one on the third floor at Prestwick. The one where she’d seen his symbol painted on the wall, before Strand and she were split up.

“Are you the one who painted over them?”

“Not smart to keep a door unlocked these days. Too much crime. It isn’t safe.” His head tips carefully to one side as he studies her. “But sometimes it’s the only way home.”

“What do the symbols mean, though?” She pulls out her phone and opens the photos app. “I found all of these painted in a tunnel, down in Olympia. They’re similar to yours, but the images inside the circles are different. Can you tell me what these mean? Or how they work?”

“You already know how they work.”

“No, I don’t – Simon, I don’t understand any of this.”

“You unlocked the gates and you went through the door.” The words roll out of his mouth slowly, as if he’s talking to a child. Alex resists hurling the phone in her hand at him. “You’re frustrated at me because you’re scared. But this is how it was always supposed to be.”

She taps a finger at the photos on her phone. “These are doors.”

“Yes.”

“But… how?”

“You have a mysterious past, Alex. One that will alter the ancient and broken powerful past. The world visible beneath the warm spot on the tapestry. The underlying reality, hidden inside the navel of the earth.”

“What are you – what do you mean by a mysterious... what tapestry?” she asks, failing to keep up with his typical prophecy-esque talk.

“Do you have a pen?” Without waiting for an answer, he goes to the wall behind her and hands her a marker. “Draw your door.”

Alex glances at the blank wall, then back at Simon.  

“Draw,” he repeats.

“I don’t…” her words fall away as she puts the marker to the wall and draws. Three black lines curl out from an inverted triangle. Not until she sees it does she remember – she’d doodled it across the backs of worksheets and the margins of notebooks in school. Back then it was a silly design, something to keep her busy while the teacher droned on. The image makes her think of the Celtic triple spiral she’s come across during research for the podcast.

“Good,” Simon hums from beside her. “Now add the two circles around it.”

“What are these for?” she asks as she draws, trying to keep the lines as steady as she can.

“Going.” He taps at the outer circle, then at the inner circle. “Returning.”

She opens her mouth to ask, but he beats her to the question. “It’s not recommended to draw a door with only one circle.”

“Why’s that?”

“You always want a way back.”  

For a moment, he meets her gaze and the weight behind his eyes is palpable. It could be guilt, or fear – she isn’t sure. He looks lost, which is not something she would ever associate with him, the young man with his lofty words and high intellect.  

“Now, think of a safe space. Somewhere you can go that no one will bother you.” He reaches down and takes her hand in his, lays her palm against the wall. It should be cool to the touch, but there’s a heat that prickles at her skin, as if she’s put her hand too close to an open flame. Just like in the tunnel, her hair stands on end at the sensation. “Concentrate. You’re going to go, but you also want to stay.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right. Do it anyway.”

“How–” she’s cut off by the sudden appearance of her living room. The world feels as if it’s tilted farther on its axis, ten degrees too sharp, as the blue couch and ivory walls and cream curtains all spin around her; she reaches out for her armchair and sinks into it, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Somewhere to the left, Simon is talking to Relay.

Her phone trills; she reflexively digs into the pockets of her jacket for it. “Where’s – where’s my phone?”

“You left it on your desk.”

She watches Simon take a seat on the floor at her feet, grinning as Relay jabs a wet nose against his cheek.

“That’s – no, I just heard it.”

“That’s the other you,” he explains, as if that’s even remotely an answer. “I thought you would have read up on bilocation when you met me at the hospital.”

Her mouth goes dry, falling open twice before she can come up with a response to that. “Are you saying that I’m bilocating right now?”

“To be more precise, you’re temporal bilocating.”

“Right. Because everyone knows what that is.”  

She rubs at the tickle in her nose, the tremors in her hand making it difficult. Her head feels like it’s too full of itself, dizzy with the way it constantly feels like someone’s pulling a rug out from underneath her and she’s just starting to fall backwards. A headache blooms across her forehead as she takes deep breaths to calm herself, trying to work past the discomfort of having two bodies, feeling two heartbeats. She’d make a _Doctor Who_ joke if she could work up the attempt at humor. Or if Simon would even get it. 

“It’s late evening right now. But back in your office, it’s still just after lunch.”

“That’s… impossible.”  

The position of the sun outside and the clock on the entertainment center back up his claim, though.  

Simon hums a negative tone at her disbelief. “There are many things that seem impossible, only so long as one does not attempt them.”

“Is this your new schtick, talking in quotes?” she snaps back,  rubbing at her dripping nose again. Worry is a rough stone in her stomach when she sees the shiny blood coating her hand. The thick, coppery scent only adds to the queasiness she feels from this ‘temporal’ excursion. The other Alex, the one back at her office, wrinkles her nose at the smell.

Handing her a paper towel from the kitchen, Simon hovers, watching as it becomes soggy and tacky with blood.

“I think you should go back,” he tells her.  

“No!” Her protest is muffled through the towel and doesn’t have the bite she intended. “I need you to tell me how this works. How do I know where I’ll end up? And when?”

“Temporal travel isn’t my specialty,” he admits. “Beginners can only manage a few minutes at first, maybe an hour.”

“You said – earlier, you mentioned something about when I was at Prestwick.”

“You used my door. I drew it with an intended route – you wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere but where I decided. Not unless you were strong enough to override it. Since you’re a beginner, you only went forward a few minutes.”

With a grimace, she swallows back the blood that’s trickled down into her throat. “But yesterday at the tunnel, I stepped on a symbol and it sent me to these cliffs nearby.”

“How long were you gone for?”  

Thinking back, she recalls Strand mentioning on the drive back that he’d been searching for her for nearly ten minutes.  

The thought must show on her face, because Simon continues without her reply, “Despite the intent behind the door, you can still manipulate time. There are places, Alex, in between the spaces we know, where the rules aren’t right angles – they’re parabolas. They’ll curve and stretch. Occasionally, we can play in that space between the two lines.”

The thought of contemplating even the most basic mathematics principle makes Alex wish desperately for the ibuprofen that’s in her medicine cabinet.  

“But the Sumerian drawings around your... doors. What are they for?”

“The universe whispers to me through them.” At his answer, she shoots him a skeptical look. “I’m powerful,” he tells her.

Alex chuckles at the understatement. “I think we’ve established that, Simon.”  

A smile crosses his face, seemingly pleased that she finds him funny. It’s gone, though, as he continues, “If I draw them, I can see everything.”

“Everything as in...?”

He stands up from the floor and gives Relay a pat on the head, ignoring her attempt to pry more information out of him. “Your dog is nice, but you should go back now.”

“Will it always be like this?” She motions to the bloody towel tacked to her upper lip.

“Practice makes perfect.”  

He leads her back through the living room and over to the symbol. She takes his hand and her office forms around them, the world righting itself as her two heartbeats become one. The symbol fades from the wall. “You should limit your travel to only twice a day, though. I have come across several who pushed themselves too far.”

At her questioning look, he continues in the same even tone, as if he were discussing the weather, “Those who do end up sealing themselves in the in-between.”

“Which is what would happen if I…” she shudders, not wanting to finish the thought. “Well, thank you for helping me.” Simon ducks his head at her gratitude; she reaches out and squeezes his shoulder. “No, really. Thank you.”

“I had no other choice. You’re the Auditor.”

“What do you mean?”

He jerks back, stepping closer to his symbol on the wall, as if she’s going to strike him. “He told me about you. The woman with her ear to the door.”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“An interested party. You’re getting too close. I’m supposed to tell you that your counter is messy.” He looks pained saying the words, like he’s pulling them from his mouth unwillingly. “I don’t want to, though. I’m supposed to say a lot of things, but I don’t want to. You seem nice. You are nice. But there’s dust, from your makeup. It’s on the counter and on the floor, the white one with the little black flowers.”

“Wait, how do you–”  

Cutting her off, Simon rattles off the brand of her perfume, describes the green package of makeup wipes, tells her the eyeliner shades she keeps in an old jam jar.  

“Have you been inside my house before?” she demands to know.

“That doesn’t matter. I can go right now, I can go next week.”

“No, Simon, it does matter.”

“He’s here. He was coming, like I told you before, but now he’s here. I tried to hide things from him, just like I told your doctor, but he can see through the randomness now. He couldn’t before, but he can now.”

Alex takes another step, reaching for his arm to curb the panic attack she can see building behind his eyes. “You still haven’t told me who ‘he’ is. If you’re in trouble, I can help you. You have to–”

“Go. I have to go.” Dancing backwards out of her reach, his back hits the wall and he’s gone, his symbol fading along with him.

 

\------

 

When Alex stops by Nic’s office to let him know she’s going home early, he wants to know if something is wrong. At her strained laugh, he pushes her into a chair and coaxes her into confessing. On how she can apparently bilocate, and how it works, and how it’s happened a few times before. After the vehement repetitions of the story to him, and assurances that this wasn’t one of her wild nightmares, Nic is quiet.

For a few moments, at least.

“So, like,” he crosses his arms behind his head as he settles back in his chair, “you’re like a real-life _Portal_ game.” He throws his hands up at her sigh. “I’m sorry, I know, no more video game references, I promise. It’s just so… crazy! My best friend is a time traveler.”

He flashes his trademark grin, his eyebrows doing their little waggle. “Can I call you the Doctor?”

Alex tilts her head, as if considering. “Do you want to be my trusty companion?”

Underneath her feigned annoyance, she’s thankful for Nic’s support, especially with an admission as outrageous as this. If there’s one person she can count on for giving her the benefit of the doubt (even when it seems wholly impossible), it’s him.  

“No thanks. Might as well put me in a red shirt and put me onboard the Enterprise, I’d probably live longer. Besides, you’ve already got yourself a doctor.” For good measure, he does another eyebrow waggle. “The good news is I can stop looking for Simon, then. I had it narrowed down between Alaska and Argentina.”

She shrugs. “You were probably right on both accounts. He seems to be quite the globe trotter.”      

“Yeah, that’s still hard to comprehend. All of this is, if I’m being honest. Do you think that you could do something like that?”

“Be in two places at once that are on opposite sides of the hemisphere?” She blows out a breath and shakes her head. “I doubt it. I got a nose bleed and a migraine from traveling to another part of the city.”

Nic narrows his gaze and gives her a quick once-over, as if he’ll find an answer somewhere on her sweater.

“If you’re going to… travel again today, is it possible – can you take me with you? I really don’t like the idea of you getting hurt some…place or time that I can’t help you.”  

Alex runs her teeth over her bottom lip. Simon hadn’t said anything against the idea, but she isn’t sure if she wants Nic to accompany her – not where she’s planning to go.

“I’d rather not risk it.”

“All right, I get it. But find out from Simon if it’s an option, at least for the future, if you can.”

“I will.” Gathering her things, she’s almost out the door before Nic calls after her, that critical look of his still firmly in place.

“Be careful, Alex. I’m serious.”

“I will,” she repeats, shooting him a reassuring smile before closing the door behind her.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season Two Nic Silver: taking things in stride since 19...whenever.  
> What do you mean season three Nic was a major asshole? Never heard of him. 
> 
> This chapter ended up being the shortest of the whole story, but treat this like that one brief level section of trail before the summit because we're about to start climbing. Ah, bad hiking metaphors, how I have missed you since _And the mountains_...
> 
>  
> 
> Terms/allusions:
> 
> "The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul." - _The Hundred Secret Senses_ by Amy Tan
> 
> "There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them." - _Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die)_ by André Gide
> 
> BHG = _Better Homes and Gardens_


	3. Chapter 3

Her boots scuff against the gravel that leads from the parking lot to the bathrooms.  

They smell just as she remembered: a combination of stagnant water and wood rot. A strong wind sweeps past, replacing the odor with the fresh, earthen scent of the lake. High grass brushes across her jeans as she moves around the building and into the shade of a tree.

Arguing drifts up to her from the boat that sits on its trailer, waiting to launch. A man hangs out the open window of the truck, shouting reminders about the winch strap. A teenage boy hops out onto the ramp and trudges through the water to unhook the strap from the bow ring. Untethered, the boat slips backwards into the water as the woman on board guides it to the rest against the dock. Leaning over the side with a rope is a teenage girl, who ties them up to the dock and shouts something to the boy. They chatter back and forth in excited voices, too hurried and too far for Alex to understand.

She can’t recall what the conversation was about.

The man returns from parking the truck, hefting a small cooler on his shoulder – the one Perry forgot to put onboard when they were packing the boat in the driveway. Even from a hundred feet away, Alex can hear the bad pirate impressions start up as the man swings a leg over onto the boat. The two teenagers groan in unison, rolling their eyes.

Alex wraps her arms around her chest, her heart clenching at the display. All four of them are running about to tuck things away, preparing to head out to Halfway Point, the little cove where her dad likes to fish and prop his feet up on the railing, even though he’ll complain about his ankles later. Where her mom likes to open a Patricia Cornwell novel and hide her glass of white Zinfandel in between the two tackle boxes. Where Alex and her brother like to wade to the rocky shore and climb up to the swinging rope they found last summer.

Tears make their way down her face as she watches the boat idle out to open water and then roar to life. She can see her younger self’s hair whip in the wind, blowing behind her like a dark, rippling flag, her head bent down next to her brother’s as they shout above the wind to hear one another.

Alex tracks the boat until it disappears around the bend, gone from sight. Wiping away the tears, she’s not surprised when she pulls her hand away to see her fingers tinged red, a slight tackiness to them from her bleeding nose.

It’s time to go back.  

 

\------

 

Within the long shadows of evening, something is moving towards her. It’s coming up the hill, flickering and bouncing between the trees. Alex sees it as she pulls into Strand’s driveway, her headlights carving a deep shadow against the detached garage. A pair of long-fingered hands curl around the eaves of the garage’s roof, two yellow eyes peering down at her. When she opens her door, three distinct knocks echo up from the pines that collect along the hill – Strand’s version of a privacy fence. Whatever it is knocks again as she makes her way across the driveway and up onto the porch. A soft voice calls to her, requesting her to _come close_ ,  _come help_. At her disregard the voice comes again, beckoning in high, distressed tones.

Alex picks up the pace, not wanting to spare the time to fall into another one of her nightmares – though she’s going to have to come to terms that they may not just be nightmares after all. Now isn’t the time to consider that, though. Not with everything else that’s fallen into her lap.

Once safely inside the house, she locks the door behind her. Unable to resist, her hand moves the blinds back from the front window. The yellow eyes watch her from under the porch railing, hidden in the bushes there. She stares it down, her heart racing and her breath fogging up the glass, until whatever it is blinks and vanishes into the dark of the evening.

Turning from the window, she spots the note on the coffee table.

_In the bat cave._

_R.S._  

Pocketing it, she takes the stairs down to the basement. Strand is sitting on the worn sofa, his limbs sharpened to angles as he leans over the coffee table where a leather-bound journal and a stack of files sit, open for inspection. Peering above his glasses, he watches as she steps down and into the room.

Spread out around the sofa are boxes of old books and black tapes, waiting to be rifled through. They’d talked about moving some of it over to her house, since Strand was practically half-living there anyway. But he’d shot down the idea on account of interested parties that might break in to steal one of the elusive black tapes. And, although Relay was a good dog, he wasn’t the best when it came to warding off strangers.

“What’s on the research menu for tonight?”  

Alex drops down onto the couch beside him and puts a hand on his shoulder, kneading the muscles there. He takes a deep breath and holds it in as she continues to work across his shoulder and up to his neck. His exhale becomes a sigh, long and heavy.

“Cross-comparing entries in my father’s journal with cases I debunked.” At Alex’s hum of interest, he continues, “I think that if I can follow his trail, so to speak, I can figure out how… well, where and how he went wrong.”

“You mean you want to know why your father thought you’re some… descendant of an ancient line of Templars or Illuminati that can bring about the end of days.”

“Which he was wrong about, just as I said.”  

Caving to her touch, Strand uncurls from his hunched position and slumps against the cushion. Alex continues her massage, though her hand has since slipped from his neck and is moving higher. A shiver runs through him as she runs her blunt nails through his hair.

His head lolls to the side, trapping her wrist against the cushion, as his gaze flickers between her eyes and her lips. The latter seem to win him over, because he leans across the space between them and gives her a soft kiss. The movement frees her hand, which she uses to cup his jaw and hold him close, so she can press another kiss against his chapped lips. Warmth spreads across her thigh where he runs his palm along her jeans, until he can curl his hand around her hip and urge her closer.

Alex obliges, and Strand lets out a noise of surprise when she moves to straddle him, tilting his head up so she can put her mouth back on his in that warm, desperate way she’s been wanting since Sunday. He reaches for her waist, fitting her against him, her nips at his bottom lip dragging a ragged breath from his lungs.

“I actually came here to talk, believe it or not,” she says, pausing their kisses to lay her forehead on his and catch her breath.

His shoulders jostle under her hands with a soft chuckle. “Considering our positions, I’m leaning towards the ‘not’ right now.”  

At that she giggles, moving to press her lips against his forehead. Her laughter is tinged with enough hysteria, though, that Strand seems to notice. He pulls back, his hands coming up to cradle her face.  

“What is it?” he asks. His worried eyes meet hers as his thumbs brush across her cheeks.  

Using the precious seconds to work up her nerve, she shifts to sit next to him. One of his hands drifts across to squeeze above her knee. With his gaze firmly set on hers, she spills.

“I can bilocate.”  

Alex reaches for his hand, but he pulls it away, the line of his body tightening. Her hand hovers between them for a moment before she tucks it away into her lap. Strand’s eyebrows pinch down, his lips twisting into a frown.  

“What do you–”

“I met with Simon today.” The words come so fast that she’s not entirely sure if Strand understood her, but she pushes forward, wanting to lay out all of the information before he can stop her. “He showed me how to do it, how to draw a symbol and travel through it and how to come back. I got as much out of him as I could before he returned to being Mister Mysterious again, talking about tapestries and calling me the Auditor and talking again about how ‘he’ is coming.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were meeting with him?”

She crosses her arms across her chest. “That’s your big takeaway.”

“Yes,” he answers, eyebrows knitting together, his blue eyes sparking with heat.

“He just showed up! When I came back from lunch, he was waiting for me in my office and–”

“Then you should’ve called me. Or Nic.” Bolting up from the couch as if he’s been struck, he makes it a few steps before he whirls around to face her. “He murdered his parents. He’s wanted for questioning in the murder of nine others. He escaped from confinement – his punishment for killing two people – and now you let him into your office with open arms.”

“He bilocated into my locked office. It wasn’t like I left the door wide open with a welcome sign strung across the doorway.”

“You might as well have. You practically goad him on with your lack of critical thinking, the way you take everything at face value. You’re like a tabula rasa for him to inscribe all of his delusional ideas into.” He lets out a scoffing laugh that almost hurts her as much as his words. She came here to have a serious discussion with him, not to be laughed at and ridiculed.

“I’m not sure if it’s because you’re blinded by this… relationship we have, but I feel that I need to remind you that I’m a grown woman who can make her own decisions on who she meets, what she does, and what she believes in. I’ve met with more dangerous people than Simon Reese. He looks like a strong wind could blow him away, for god’s sake.”

“That isn’t the point. You need someone there with you to anchor you to reality. Someone like me, so you don’t fall for these delusions.”

Her world narrows to a single point as she springs up from the couch, the coffee table a barrier between them.

“I’m delusional now?” Strand opens his mouth to respond, but she cuts him off, not wanting to give him the opportunity for one of his academic lectures (and really,  _very much_ not wanting to hear it right now). “All I’m asking is for you to hear me out, to listen to what I have to say before you cling to your trademark apophenia defense. You have this neatly arranged idea of the world that can’t be touched, because everything _you’ve_ experienced has been calculated and measured and quantified and written into textbooks. I’m telling you that I have experiences – some you yourself were there for – that can be proven. Which is something you claimed to want, back when you started your institute, and this is the response I get.”

His eyes are wide behind his glasses. “Alex, I–”

“I’ll prove it.” She snatches a pen up from the table and stomps over to the wall, carving thick lines into the paneling. He says her name again, moving until he’s beside her, until he can grab her wrist and pull it back. “You don’t want me to prove it.” Realization blooms across her face in a rush of heat, her cheeks pinkening. “Because if I’m right, then that means Tannis’s claims of bilocation would be real, too. And his claim to be psychic. And you – you said before that you grew desperate, during your search for Coralee.”

“Stop. Listen to me, st–”  

She yanks her hand out of his grasp.

“No. I’m tired of your redirection tactics. If we’re going to argue, I want to know exactly what we’re arguing about. You’re angry, aren’t you – that what happened in Olympia proves that these abilities are real. That maybe you were psychic, and you just weren’t good enough.”

“I’m telling you to stop because you’re bleeding,” he hisses at her, those blue eyes of his wild with a mixture of irritation and panic.

Her hand drifts up to her nose, the skin coming away bright red. Strand moves off to find a tissue for her, leaving her alone with her drawing. The symbol stares back at her, the grooved lines of it rough and crooked, dark blue against the oak panels. She reaches out to trace the lines. A frisson of energy passes through her fingers, up through her wrist, and along her forearm, an invisible pressure gripping her tendons and squeezing them. The pain makes her breath catch, stumbling back from the wall.

Strand returns and hands her a worn T-shirt for her nose that he must’ve pulled from the nearby laundry room.

“Come here. Sit down,” he instructs, moving to put an arm around her shoulders, but Alex skirts away from him, backing away until she runs into the couch. Confusion, heavy and raw, settles across his face at her retreat.

“I’m going home. I’m – I have an interview with Tannis tomorrow. He’s going to give me more information.”

“Don’t go,” Strand urges, his voice low, as if he’s talking to an injured animal. “At least, not like this. You can stay here, wait for your nose to stop bleeding.”

She’s already at the bottom step, her hand on the railing.

“I’ll share what I find out with Nic. If you care to know, you can talk to him.” With that, she darts up the stairs and through the house, the slam of the front door echoing her departure.

Strand wanders over to the couch and sinks down onto the back of it, tucking his arms around himself. The drawing stares back at him as he sits, wanting Alex to come back, waiting for the impossible.

 

\------

 

His sleep is fitful that night. After trying out every sleep position, he flips the bedside lamp on and does some light reading, finding that even Harriet Hall’s column in _Skeptic_ on the sensed presence effect isn’t enough to put him to sleep. It’s a combination of getting too little sleep the night before, having been woken by Alex twice in the night (once to her coming to bed, the other to rouse her from a bad dream), and having caffeine too late in the day.  

It isn’t because he’s gone over what she said to him in the basement a hundred times. It isn’t because he’s thought about what happened in Olympia a hundred more. It isn’t because he’s worried that he just fucked everything up by going on the defense with her – something that, after proving it time and time again during their partnership, never ends well. And here he thought he was too old to be worrying over things like this.   

Sometime after night has technically become morning, his body gives in to the emotional exhaustion and lets him slip under the pulling tide of sleep.

Alex is standing in the doorway to his office. Not the temporary one at the university he uses occasionally, but the one in the big house. That’s what he’s taken to calling it, having replaced ‘father’s house’ with something easier ( _something more permanent_ , a little voice reminds him). Because it is a big house – over four thousand square feet that contains five bedrooms, two and a half baths, two living areas, and a furnished basement. Certainly too much house for one man.

So, he likes it when Alex comes over, usually with her dog in tow, and fills it up. If he’s downstairs in the basement, he can hear her footsteps above as she makes a fresh pot of coffee. If he’s in the bedroom, he can hear the musical thumps of the pipes (and her off-key singing) as she showers. If they’re outside tending to the front yard’s paltry landscaping, he can hear her laugh from the side yard as Relay dives (again) into the leaf piles he raked up (again).  

He really, really likes it. Okay, he loves it – loves her, and the way she makes this big, empty house feel like a home.  

If he tells her, though, it’ll change this thing between them, make it more permanent. He’d let his guard down over the summer, when she was lying there next to him in front of the campfire, having almost been whisked away by the river hours earlier. He’d listened to her confession, all while his body had hummed with the need to cross the distance between them. He’d held back, though, needing to admit his own penance – but she’d pulled him close before he could even get it all out, had absolved him of his guilt when her lips had found his.

And if Warren and his cult are still after him, then that’s a chance he’s not willing to take, to bring her down with him. Even while he knows she’ll follow him to the ends of the earth for her story (and, for some reason, for him).  

So to see her standing in the doorway, then, isn’t something new.  

“How do you want your tea?” She leans against the doorframe as she asks, a mug already in hand, her nails tapping at the design on the front (a falcon carrying a goat’s head – not something he recalls being in his cupboard). There’s an easy smile on her face as she awaits his answer, unaware of the danger behind her.

Because the hallway is completely black. Not just dark, in the way that it gets when evening comes and he hasn’t turned on the hall light, but there’s nothing; a yawning maw of darkness that threatens to consume her.  

“Alex, come here,” he demands, standing up from his desk so fast that he knocks the chair over in his haste. He stretches a hand out to her, beckoning her from the dark.  

Ignorant of it all, she raises a brow at him, that familiar smirk on her face as she tilts her head in entertained confusion.  

“Why?” she drags the word out playfully.  

Something moves in that darkness – a black tendril, then two, then too many to count, wrapping around her limbs, snagging chunks of her hair and _pulling_.

He’s over the desk and at the door, wrapping her tight in his arms, tugging her back to safety.  

“Richard, what’s–” She turns back to look at the darkness behind her, at the long strings of it that encase her.  

“No, don’t,” he begs, grasping her chin and urging her to turn from it. “Don’t – look at me, Alex. Stay with me. Don’t look at it.”  

She fights with the tendrils wrapped in her hair, breaking away for a moment – just long enough that he can see what she does, reflected in her eyes for an instant: a river of fire, eating away at the ground where she stands. Then the vision is gone, replaced by fear that bubbles hot and quick in her eyes. It’s like a brand against his chest, scoring the flesh his heart races under.  

The darkness pulls again, her body lurching against his. He plants his feet and fights to keep his hold on her. _It won’t have her_ , he tells himself, and maybe he says it out loud, because Alex’s expression shifts, more acceptance than fear now, and his chest tightens at the sight of it. She brings her hand up, her fingertips brushing against his that cradle her cheek.  

 _No_ , he thinks – shouts – when her shoulders loosen, her body losing its fight.  

Then she’s gone, ripped away into the void, the office door swinging shut in his face.  

He hears a noise. One that he heard as a boy on a walk with his father and sister, when they came upon a fox caught in a foothold trap, its cries of pain echoing through the woods. His father led them away, claiming that nature would take its course, and they listened to its cries as they left it behind.

He realizes he’s the one making the noise.  

Scrambling for the doorknob, he throws open the door and is met with the hallway – returned to its usual state, the overhead light warming up the long corridor. He shouts her name, following the hallway down to where it meets the living room, searching the rest of the house, calling after her, repeating the search again and again until he comes to the inevitable conclusion that he was too slow to save her.  

Alex is gone.  

It’s at this realization that he wakes up, her name on his lips. The rest of the early morning hours are spent awake, convincing himself to forget the dream.

 

 

He doesn’t.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pre-chapter warning for body horror, because there is a small amount in this chapter.

The next morning, Alex decides to take the risk and go.  

Looming above her is a brick mansion with white columns lining the front porch, towering three stories up. The double doors are propped open, people trickling out with small decorative items. Out front is a row of cars, their candy-colored paint jobs shining in the mid-morning sun. Most of them are classic models that she can only guess the age of as ‘old.’

From somewhere close by comes the sound of a radio. Casey Kasem announces the number three spot and soon enough, Eric Clapton starts playing. Beyond a few pieces of farm equipment, Alex finds the boat.  

The 1979 Bayliner Victoria sits on its trailer, its vinyl windscreens rolled away to let people move through it with ease. Forest-green paint covers the hull and trim, leaving the rest that bright, pearly white. Chrome rails gleam across the bow where two boys sit, kicking their feet through the gaps.

The trailer’s stairs lead up to the swim platform, above which is the familiar, slanting script that reads: _Lady Ellen_.

“That bench seat, though,” her dad grimaces as he comes up from below deck. “It looks like they let Bigfoot take her for a ride. I’d probably need to have it re-upholstered.”

Another man follows up behind him, dressed in finer clothes than Pat Reagan, who perpetually looked like he was about to run away to the Keys in his DAN T-shirt, cargo shorts, and threadbare Chuck Taylors. Alex vividly recalls her mom referring to him as Jimmy Buffett Junior, which her dad always grinned at. “This chair, though. It looks new.”

“Todd Marine chair, installed last year.”  

Her dad pats the seat, leaning against it as he looks over the boat. The other man waits patiently, scribbling on a clipboard. To Alex it looks like he’s doodling, pretending to keep busy while her dad chews on the price tag.

“All right, Mike. How’s sixteen-five sound?”

“Sounds like I’ll have to check with the owners. I’ll be back as soon as I speak with them.”  

Pat nods, settling into the helm chair as Mike heads for the house.

And Alex, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses and her hair layered around her face, steps up onto the platform and speaks to her dad for the first time in seven years.

“It’s a beautiful boat. Are you thinking of getting it?” At her question, he spins around in the chair to face her.

“She certainly is – I’m hoping my wife will think so, too. If she doesn’t kill me first.”  

Alex scans the boat, knowing how he will wax it back to a beautiful shine and tune it up (and nearly electrocute himself when rewiring). She knows how her mom will complain about it all, but she’ll do it half-heartedly, especially after they take it out on the water next summer.

“She’ll probably want to at first, but she won’t.”

Suddenly, she’s thankful for the sunglasses that hide the tears in her eyes, hearing that wheezy laugh again. She’d give anything for a brief glimpse of recognition from him, for him to come over and wrap her up in a hug, tip her from side to side and call her Kiddo or Bug like he used to.    

She thinks of how bringing Strand up for dinner would’ve gone, how her dad would’ve put on that pompous act of his – only to nudge and wink at her when her date turned away (just like he’d done with John and Sloane and even that one ill-fated dinner with Mark that ended with him having an allergic reaction to the family cats Hootie and Kravitz).

“Let’s hope so.” Pat shoots her a quick grin that fades to a softer smile. “But, if I’m being honest, I’m getting it for our kids. I think they’ll like it, being out on the water. I might even have to buy one of those inner tubes for them.”

“They–” she pauses to clear her throat, excusing it away with a comment about allergies. “They’ll love it.”

Pat's grin bounces back. He starts to say something else when Mike appears at the foot of the stairs. The owners have counter-offered for sixteen-seven. Pretending to inspect the name inscribed on the back, she listens to Pat drag out a hum and blow out a quick breath. Decision made, then.

“If you’ve got a phone inside so I can call my wife, I think we have a deal.”  

With that, Mike leads him away, their voices fading under the noise of the countdown’s number two spot.

When Alex returns home, the world beyond her bedroom window is just starting to pinken, a rosy orange spilling around the curtains. Relay watches her from the bed, his tail giving a meager wag when she slumps next to him. His ears perk up when she hiccups out a sob, his warm body wiggling until he can climb up onto her lap. The wet nose against her skin tickles and she grins around a sniffle, slipping her arms around the comforting weight of him as the sun rises around them.

 

\------

 

“Okay, buddy, I’ll see you at lunch. Promise me you’ll be... oh, hell.”

Somehow, by the time she’s ready to head out for the day, her coffee is already cold.  

Alex tries it again, hoping the first sip was a fluke. It wasn’t, she realizes with a grimace as she swallows back the cool, tarry liquid.  

Scowling at the travel mug (which was free as part of a sponsorship with Yeti – they had, in fact, jumped on board for the Bigfoot episode), Alex heads into the kitchen to warm it back to a drinkable temperature. There’s no way she’s spending the twenty minutes it takes to drive two miles to the studio with no coffee.  

She’s hovering in front of the microwave, watching the drink lazily spin around in a ceramic cup, when she hears a doorknob rattle.  

It’s distinct enough that she can hear the latch protest, the brass components inside grinding with age.  

Alex straightens up from the counter and slowly turns. Her pulse kicks up as her eyes track across the kitchen and into the hall. The only source of light is the morning sun, which barely reaches the short hallway. It remains just dark enough that, if she stares for too long, things will start to move in the shadows there.  

She’s not watching the shadows, though. Her attention is on the spare bedroom’s door. Its knob jerks back and forth, whining as it’s twisted.  

The latch finally releases and the door slowly swings inward. The inside knob thumps softly against the bedroom wall.  

On the edge of her periphery, Relay perks up at the noise and lifts his nose to the air to investigate. His growl is soft and low, a warning to whatever he’s smelled.  

“Who’s there?” Alex calls, frustrated when her voice betrays her by cracking.  

There’s no response.  

She chances a step forward, and then another. It’s Maddie’s voice she waits for, for her whisper and call her _little one_ , just as she does in Alex’s nightmares. Because that’s what this is, of course – she’s still asleep. She has to be. This must be the nightmare that waited until it was almost time to wake up.   

Under the microwave’s hum, she hears something. It’s rhythmic, almost. A solid thump, followed by a scraping sound. Layered below is something else: a wet, slopping sound, like bathwater slipping over onto the floor.

Then: movement, just inside the doorframe. A flash of green plaid, red denim. Something stumbles out into the hall, their gait impeded by their right leg. It’s twisted backwards, the ruined jeans they wear revealing deep gashes, the white of bone glinting through strips of muscle. The sharp point of their ankle digs into the floor as they drag the leg forward, leaving bloodied grooves in the hardwood.  

They shuffle closer and the kitchen light reveals more of them. Their right arm is contorted, bent backwards in what seems like three different directions. Two remaining fingers twitch at her, as if waving hello; the rest are missing, the skin and muscles shredded down to the palm.  

Stomping forward on the left foot, they leave the right to trail behind. Relay growls at their advance.

The fetid smell of decay wafts closer.

More light floods onto them, revealing them entirely to Alex: their crushed ribcage, their broken shoulder breaking through the skin. Violently jerked to the left, their neck makes a grotesque popping noise as they sway, trying to keep upright. With their face angled up towards the ceiling, their jaw is left to dangle, having been nearly torn from the skull.    

From their ruined mouth, thick chunks of blood ooze onto the floor. The skin on the face is mostly gone, leaving behind the whites of the sunken nasal bones and their right eye that bores into hers.  

She wouldn’t have known who they were, not at first, given the lack of facial features. It’s like a switch being flipped when she makes out the words at the top of their shirt, the collarbone poking through the first _o_ : _Everything you know is a lie!_  

The horrific state of his body makes sense now. What he’s doing in her house after being dead for twelve years is what doesn’t.  

“Why are you here, Travis?” she asks, after locating her voice.  

His one eye on hers, he slowly drags his mangled right leg forward to lean onto it. Alex holds back a hot wave of nausea at the sound of the bone splintering under the weight.  

He speaks, or tries to, but the words are lost under a raspy tone and the cracking sound of his jaw. When Alex shakes her head, he tries again, louder.  

“...coming,” he croaks, followed by a pained groan. Like tape peeling from a box, his jaw tears from his body and lands on the floor with a sickening crack. Viscous liquid splatters across the floor and baseboards.     

Clapping a hand over her mouth, Alex fights the urge to vomit at the sight.  

Travis, or the thing that used to be him, brings his left hand up. The four remaining fingers clench around his broken neck and squeeze.  

“Coming, coming,” he repeats, pushing the words out through his torn mouth. His chest shudders as he fights to take in air around his own hand.

Relay is barking, now, fur raised along his neck and back.  

“Stop!” Alex demands, rushing forward but keeping the island between them. “Travis, stop! Who’s coming?”  

Travis shakes his head, the tendons clicking as he does.  

“Here,” he moans.  

Something beeps, loud and shrill. Alex jumps at the noise, spinning to look behind her. It’s just the microwave, now sitting dark and silent. She turns back to Travis.  

The hallway is empty. There’s no disfigured corpse, no putrefied jaw, no grooves in the hardwood. The bedroom door is firmly shut.

It could have been a nightmare. Pinching herself does nothing to wake her from it, though.  

So, maybe not a nightmare, then.  

Abandoning the coffee, she clips Relay’s leash onto him and ushers him out the door, promising him that he can keep Nic company at the studio. There’s no way in hell she’s leaving her dog here by himself, not after that.  

As Alex pulls away from the curb, she bites down the urge to look back at the front windows. If she does, she’ll see that mangled hand holding back the curtains, that one dull eye watching her.

So, she doesn’t, and never sees the curtain fall back into place as she drives away.

 

\------

 

“I have to ask, what’s the sudden interest in bilocation?”  

Tannis looks right at home as he settles back in his chair, holding a coffee cup and saucer, poised as if he’s waiting on someone to take a photograph. His dark hair is styled in a sleek wave, his sparkling eyes covered by a pair of round, tortoiseshell glasses. His suit is a crisp navy-blue, like the color of the bay that hides beneath the fog.

Faux succulents spill out of glass globes on the tables, which are made of barnwood that’s been dusted with gold paint, glittering under the Edison bulbs. Interspersed throughout the coffee shop are white ceramic rabbits, keeping up with the theme. The White Rabbit is an Instagrammer’s wet dream with its reclaimed wood, quirky accents, and white-on-black subway tile walls that feature cross-stitched images of Seattle. It’s all very hashtag eclectic-farmhouse.

It’s also located on one of the busier side streets in downtown, which means it took Alex a good twenty minutes to find parking. Next time, she’s decided that she’ll pick the meeting place.

“I have this new subject, err, rather – what I mean is I interviewed this person and they claim to have this ability, to bilocate. But they’re not comfortable enough with me to tell me how it works, so I wanted to speak with someone who can.” Alex snaps her mouth shut before she can stumble over another sentence. From behind his cup, Tannis’s lips stretch into a knowing smile. She can’t help the sigh that works out of her. “Right. I forgot. You’re psychic.”

“I’m afraid you’re simply a bad liar.” Setting the cup and saucer down, Tannis clasps his hands together in his lap and leans over the table’s edge, lowering his voice as he continues, “Tell me how you found out.”

So, she does. She tells him about her experience at Prestwick back in late spring, then down in Olympia, and then finally with Simon the day prior.

“Regular bilocation is like traveling within the confines of a city,” Tannis explains. “But if you travel near or within a liminal space, it’s similar to having access to the subway. Instead of three or four lines, you have access to hundreds, and those hundreds can lead to thousands. Suddenly, you can travel across the country, or the world.”

“Or across time?”

“Or that.” He smiles and tips his head. “I’m interested – what did you choose for your sigil?”

Picking up one of the shop’s napkins, Alex sketches out the triangle and three spirals extending from it, and slides it across the table. Tracing the design with his finger, he taps at the triangle.

“How did you come up with this?”

“Do you know what it means?” she asks.

“The center here – it stands for female power, I believe.” His eyes meet hers over the rim of his glasses. “But you already knew that. You would’ve looked it up.”

“Yes, I did. But what I don’t understand is how these work. Simon told me that when I went through his door at Prestwick, that he drew it so it would let me. And the one in that tunnel, it let me go and come back through it. So, can I draw anything and say it’s my… sigil? How do I know I’m not using someone else’s?”

A smile flickers across his face. “Are you asking if it’s like creating a username? That if you add a number and an ampersand, you can have a peace sign be your sigil?”

Alex lets out a short laugh.

“Sure, yeah, I guess.”

He takes a sip of coffee, careful to set it back in the saucer with a soft clink. “It’s difficult to explain, really. There aren’t any bona fide rules to this sort of thing, but there are… we’ll call them restrictions.”

A door is always drawn with intent. If the artist wants other people to use the door, they draw their permission into the sigil. When someone uses the door, the sigil appears on a wall or the ground – something with a strong foundation to it – so they can return, if they’ve drawn two circles. When they return back through the door, the circle is closed, and the sigil disappears.

While bilocating, the active self goes through the door and the passive self is left behind. The discomfort of experiencing two minds and two bodies at the same time can cause nausea, migraines, or loss of consciousness on the active self. For this reason, it’s also not recommended to take along people who cannot bilocate, because they don’t have the ability to use their passive self as an anchor and can become weakened or sick as a result.

“The one that I went through in that hospital,” Alex interrupts, “it only had one circle, though.”

“If you don’t leave the door open by drawing a second circle, then your passive self goes with your active. So, when you go through the door, there’s nothing to tie you there, and you can’t return the way you came. That’s why it’s usually advised to draw two circles – one for going, and one for returning,” he explains as he signals to the barista for a refill. “But like I said, these abilities don’t follow laws of any sorts. At least, not any laws of physics that we’re aware of yet. You may encounter doors that work differently, or have ones that don’t work at all, depending on your personal ability.”

Though she’s not sure she wants an answer to the next question, it has been bugging her – given where she’s seen these sigils before and knowing what they can do now.

“Is it possible for someone to open a door and let... something else... in?”

Tannis sets his shoulders back, holding her gaze as he traces the rim of his empty cup. “You mean demons.”

For the first time, she notices the outside chill as it seeps in and prickles across her legs. She fights to suppress the shiver that’s building up her spine. “Yes.”

“It is.” He leans forward as he continues, his tone low enough that it almost fades into the noise of the shop, “But you would have to give your door the intent to do so. And I do not ever recommend doing that.”

“Oh, yeah, of course, I mean – no, I–”

“I’m serious, Alex.” He rests a palm flat against the table between them, watching her until she nods in agreement. Then, like a flip has been switched, he’s back to lounging in his chair, his shoulders loose, his eyes warm and bright. “You have something else you want to ask me.”  

“I do have more of a personal question, if that’s all right.” At his hum of assent, Alex continues, “When you were doing that study at Berkeley, how did you hide your… other self from the researchers? Wouldn’t they have seen you walk into the room with the wheel? And how did you draw your sigil without them seeing you?” She stops just short of another question, realizing she needs to slow her roll, and offers him a sheepish smile.

“It’s quite alright,” he says with another easy grin on his face, as if they hadn’t just discussed opening demonic portals over lukewarm coffee. It’s the expression of a person that’s used to such inquiries being thrown at him on live television, a man accustomed to charming a host and audience. “Although I can’t give you a straight answer, since there’s no way to know for certain until someone develops a way to test abilities like ours, I’ll tell you my theory. I believe that since I do have psychic abilities, my mind has been unlocked – just as I told you before.

“There are spaces in between what regular minds and our minds can see. And I think there’s a way to go into and exist in that space without people seeing you. At least for me there is. With most people who can bilocate, controlling their passive is like… steering a faulty shopping cart. It’s sometimes difficult and doesn’t go where you want it to. I, however, can split my active and passive selves quite easily, and can use either one to complete whatever task as needed.”

“So, in the room with the wheel, you were there but you were… what, hiding in plain sight?”

“Essentially, yes.” His shoulders lift with a loose shrug. “And I don’t need to draw a door to go through it. I haven’t needed to since I was thirteen.”

The barista arrives, coffee in hand and stars in his eyes for Tannis, who slips him enough to cover the bill and a generous tip. Gathering her thoughts for a moment, Alex lets the two of them have their flirtatious banter as she eases back into her chair, not realizing she was practically hovering over the table throughout the discussion.  

Tannis’s talk of the in-between space reminds her of Simon’s claim about those who can see into the shadows. The thought sends a shiver spreads through her chest. The realization that the nightmarish creatures she’s seen could have come from this place, and not just her sleep-deprived brain, is difficult to swallow. On one hand, it means that her fucked-up imagination isn’t making these horrible things up – but on the other, it means that they could all be real. A phantom pain tickles across her scalp as she replays the memory of that thing in the woods in Idaho trying to drag her away. On some level, even then, she’d known that it was trying to take her somewhere. She just hadn’t known where. Now she knows that it could’ve been this place, this in-between, where she would’ve known nothing about sigils or doors or how to get back home.  

A shard of light dances in her eye, bringing her out of her morbid thoughts. The mid-morning sun is finally breaking through the clouds. It glints against the windows of the tall buildings that sit opposite the shop. Once the barista returns to the counter, Alex returns her attention to Tannis.

“I have to ask, now that I know you were really in the room, why did you only get eighty-eight percent correct? Why not pass with flying colors?”

He chuckles at her poor excuse for a pun. “If I’d gotten all of them correct, some would be even more skeptical than they already are.”  

It looks as if he wants to say more, but his expression shifts, something crossing his face. Alex has spent enough time around Strand and Nic to recognize concern when she sees it, no matter how controlled it may be. “The ability you have, Alex, is very special. I’ve only known of a few people who can temporal bilocate. Going into the past or the future is tricky, though. It can create… messes.”

“So, what, like _Doctor Who_ rules? No crossing into my own timeline?”

“Right. No wobbly-timey stuff.” They share a grin. “I admit, I am surprised that you didn’t realize you had this ability until now.”

“Maybe I’m a late bloomer,” she suggests, holding back a smile at her own private joke.  

“Perhaps. But puberty is typically the time by which someone comes into it. I would recommend looking into your family history. These things do tend to skip through generations and pop up in others. That may help you find other answers you seek.”

Alex makes a face at his suggestion. “Well, fat lot of good that does me. I don’t know anything about my birth parents.”

“Maybe it’s time you dug up that family tree.”

She won’t lie, she’s always been curious of the answer to her biggest unanswered question. From age two to ten, she’d been shuffled through the system. She recalls sitting on a stoop in Pelleaux, Nova Scotia and watching the traffic pass by because the group home smelled too strongly of bleach and cigarette smoke; she remembers curling up under a bush beside the front porch of her third foster home, because Lori had gotten drunk and locked the door before Alex had come home from school.

She’d been Alex Doe then, with an _N/A_ as her middle name because whoever dropped her off didn’t bother to fill that part out, and the agency never bothered to ask her if she’d like one. Then Alex Doe went to the Reagan’s house and met Pat and Maggie and their adopted son, Perry. And within two years she was Alex Scout Reagan.

Her only memory of the time before the system is a pair of red eyes watching her from the darkness. She thinks she’s crying, sobbing in that way children do, little hiccups and huffs. Then someone is rubbing her back with soft, warm swipes, and the memory falls away.

“Well,” Alex sighs, “unless I’m hallucinating the entire thing, I guess I have to start believing all of this stuff.”

“You believed some of it before.”

“Yeah, but it was like believing in climate change – it’s real, but it doesn’t affect me personally, not really. It was like watching from the side lines. Now I’m the starring role.” She goes to take a sip of her coffee, and pauses. “Do you think... well, do you think this ability or... yours – do you think it’s magic?”

His dark eyebrows furrow as he studies her. Then, slowly, his eyes lose their focus and he’s still looking in her direction, but he’s not looking _at_ her anymore.  

“Your dad carved you a whale. It was your adoption present. No – not a present, more of a keepsake.” He brings his hands up to gesture, wavering at first and then settling them seven or eight inches apart. “It’s made from an aspen tree that came down after a big storm. But you... misplaced it when you were spring cleaning this year. It’s usually on your bookcase, but it’s not there. You thought you might have accidentally put it in the box you took to Goodwill. But it’s still there, in a... box. A green shoebox in a dark room that’s always dark – probably a closet, or an unused spare bedroom. It’s underneath a blanket – one with roses printed on it.”

Alex lets out the breath she’d been holding.

“Some might call that magic, the ability to pull information out at random,” he continues. “There’s a little bit in everyone, that sixth sense, whether it’s empaths who can read the emotions of people and spaces, or people like me, who can part the curtains and spot things others miss. Only a few hundred years ago, we would’ve been burned at the stake for what we can do. In some places, we still would be. There were a few of us in the seventies and eighties making the rounds on radio and television. It was the only way to get the message across to society that we aren’t criminals, or dangerous for what we can do. So, we became ‘hot tickets’ on talk shows, because it was the only thing we could do.”

Alex wrangles back the flush that wants to appear, knowing he listened to that episode. “You wanted the public exposure.”

“Certainly. Because we also wanted those out there with similar gifts to know that they weren’t alone. That there’s nothing to be afraid of by accepting yourself.” Tannis leans across the table and takes her hand, squeezing it gently. “The same goes for you. I know that you’ll figure it all out.”

“It’s nice to hear you think that. Did you gaze into my future?” Her lips twitch as she tries for a grin, tries to act like she doesn’t need an answer to the question. He squeezes tighter for a beat, his gaze narrowing as his eyes rove across her face.

“I’m not especially gifted with precognition. Looking into the future is like trying to see through cotton – but I would advise you to be careful.” Reaching for the napkin with her sigil on it, he takes her pen and draws a slash across the drawing. Alex watches as the lines of ink fade from sight, the napkin pristine once more. “And to keep your doors locked. There are people who would seek to profit from your ability.”

His focus shifts away to a point over her shoulder before returning to her. “I have faith in you, though. And so does someone very important to you.”

With that, he stands up and slides his coat on, leaving the chair pushed back as he moves to stand beside her. As he reaches down to pat her shoulder, she catches a familiar twinkle in his eye as he glances up at the door again. “Good luck, Alex. If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to give me a call.”

Turning in her seat to thank him, she barely registers Tannis lifting a hand in farewell as he heads for the door.

Where Strand is standing with a coat slung over his arm, cheeks pink from the cold. His usually coiffed hair is in disarray, where he’s been running his fingers through it again and again, similar to when she’d found him in his office in Chicago last year. Giving the rest of him a quick once-over, she reads every bit of restless energy he gives off. His demeanor is of that of a rope, one that’s been pulled too tight and is starting to unravel from the strain. Shifting from foot to foot, he watches her watch him, waiting for a cue that he can join her.

Her foot nudges Tannis's empty chair out a few more inches.  

Strand works his way around the other tables to reach hers, hovering for a moment before settling into the chair.   

“I asked Nic where you were.”

 _Traitor_ , she thinks.

“I’m sorry,” he tries again. Alex reaches down to turn the recorder off and tucks her hands into her lap.

“Okay.”

“I was rude.”

“Yes.”  

He sighs at the clipped words, reaching up to slide a hand through his hair. “I’m – it’s difficult to wrap my head around all of this. You understand that. You understand… me.”

She squares her shoulders, preparing for the ensuing argument. “Setting this... recent development aside, are you telling me – and be honest – that nothing that’s happened over the past two years, none of it has left an impression on you?”  

“It has. I admit that there are... things that can’t be explained. At least not yet.”

She can’t help but scoff at the skepticism he clings to. “But you’re not willing to admit that it’s possible that some of this stuff might be real.”

Hesitation flits across his face before he settles on a simple, “No.”  

“So, you don’t believe me?”  

He levels her with a look, another resounding no in the form of pinched lips and narrowed eyes. “I want to.”

“Okay.”  

His hands come up to rest on the table. Hers stay firmly in her lap.

“I want to,” he repeats, pausing to wet his lips. “But you know this about me. I can’t take these leaps of faith like you do.” At her lack of a response, he shifts in his seat, straightening his glasses as he prepares his lecture. “You need to see things from my perspective.”

“Your perspective is skewed by your adamant stance on ignoring what’s right in front of you.” She earns a wince for her words but doesn’t feel the bite of pleasure she was hoping for. Remorse nestles itself deep in her breastbone, where she can feel it sting like an open wound. Arguing is just going to send them back through the same maze of irritation and distrust.  

Trying a different tactic, Alex stands up from her seat, slips into her coat, and tilts her head towards the door. “Come with me.”

Strand follows with only a few degrees of hesitancy, even as she leads him into the narrow alley beside the coffee shop. Past a set of rusting dumpsters and some impressive graffiti, she steps up to the brick wall. The marker in her coat pocket feels as if it weighs ten pounds when she pulls it out to draw against the pale brick. Turning to face Strand where he’s hovering next to her, she thinks of their many almost-conversations about his past, and tries to think of somewhere she could go into it that’s happy.

Springing from some corner of her memory is a clip from the podcast, her own voice: _Seeing Strand like this, in a tux, eating wedding cake, looking... happy, it was weird_.

Uncomfortable with the idea of crashing his wedding and struggling to recall any other specific instances, Alex makes a simple request.  

“Don’t tell me why, but give me a day when you were happy.”  

He raises an eyebrow at that, humor – despite the current situation – flashing through his eyes.

“You make me sound like the Grinch.”

“I’m serious,” she urges.  

Shifting under the sudden scrutiny, he sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m…” his gaze drops from her face to the asphalt. “All of my recent ones… they’re with you.”

Despite the rocky state of things between them, she can’t help the half-smile that tugs at her lips. “Think back a little farther for me, then.”

He obeys, closing his eyes, and then: “A campground in Amherst, Michigan. July 1992. It was a Friday.”

“Wait here.” She slips off her coat and hands it off to him. At the immediate worry that floods his face, she reaches across the divide and squeezes his arm reassuringly, motioning to the drawing. “Look, the second circle means I can return. I’ll be right back. I promise.”

And with that, she presses her palm to the chilled bricks and steps out into warm night air. Towering around her are large, leafy oak trees that rustle in the strong breeze that blows past. Above their tops she can see a hint of pale orange, the last breath of the sunset succumbing to the blue of night. Straining to see around the overhang she’s found herself under, she can see the stars winking to existence in droves, the moon just a fingernail hanging above the tree line. A one-lane road winds around the corner and continues on down to the right until it disappears around the next curve.   

Beside her sigil is a notice board nailed to the wall of a facilities building. The laminated map notifies her that she’s on Loop C of Beaver Creek Campground. On reflex, she reaches up to staunch her bloody nose, but her fingers come away clean.  

Across time and country, the other Alex’s nose also remains unbloodied. She can hear Strand talking to her in low tones, wanting her to explain what’s happening. The other Alex doesn’t seem to have the ability to talk back. All she gets for the trouble of attempting is a vicious spike of pain across her head.   

High-pitched laughter sounds from the road, breaking her concentration. A pack of kids on bicycles fly around the bend, their flashlights jostling as they ride past. Alex follows their noise, though they’re soon swallowed up by the trees, leaving her to the low hum of conversations and crackling of fires as she passes by campsites. Using her phone’s flashlight, she continues for a half mile, waiting for something familiar to catch her attention. She can’t very well walk through every campsite searching for Strand.  

Passing by a blue pickup, she comes to a fork in the road. As she contemplates which route to take, and wonders how long she wants to wander in the dark to prove a point, she hears it. Soft at first, then at a small voice’s insistence, louder: Stevie Nicks, singing about a woman taken by the wind.  

“You’re going to burn yourself,” says Strand, his tone amused, but with that parental edge to it. Alex switches off her light and peeks around the bumper to see a younger Strand and a very young Charlie seated next to a campfire. Each is wearing some form of flannel-and-denim combination, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows as they sit, roasting hotdogs. They lean away from the wind as it shifts the smoke toward them. A stack of CD cases sits next to a boombox on the ground, on top of which sits a fist-sized rock.  

Alex watches as Charlie, entranced more by the food at the end of her stick than the stick itself, inches her grip up the metal, until –

“Shit!” Charlie drops the stick into the coals, yanking her hand away from the hot metal, flapping it back and forth to shake the heat away. Strand abandons his hotdog to the flames as he reaches for her hand.

“Let me see,” he coaxes, tilting her hand into the firelight so he can inspect the damage. After a cursory look at the burn, he’s up and moving, rummaging through the tent and then in the cooler, from which Alex can hear the sound of rattling ice cubes. He returns to crouch in front of his daughter, instructing her to wrap the ice up in a shirt and place it on the burn. “There you go. Does that feel better now?”  

Charlie nods her head.  

“And don’t think I didn’t catch that colorful language you used.”  

A long tail of mousy brown hair sweeps across and over her shoulder as she looks down, avoiding eye contact with her dad.  

“Sorry,” she mutters to the ground.  

“You know the rules,” Strand reminds as a fond smile works across his face. “Once you start paying bills, you can say whatever you want.”  

That gets him an eye-roll, but Alex can see the way Charlie’s mouth ticks upwards.  

“I’d have to have a job first to have money.”

“Until then, no swearing. How’s that?”  

No longer paying him any mind, Charlie picks up the stick’s handle and pouts at the blackened, ash-coated hotdog. Strand takes the stick from her and removes the offending hotdog, replacing it with a new one. It’s the last one out of the pack, Alex notices, but he doesn’t seem to mind as he pulls his charbroiled food from the flames and slides it into a bun, as if he’s always loved his hotdogs burned to a crisp.  

Alex watches them for a few minutes more, realizing how sad it is to see the two Strands so content with sharing the silence – when now, even after spending a summer together, Charlie still seems to be trying her best to avoid her dad. It’s a topic that Strand himself has brought up a few times with Alex, when the lights are off so he can spill his worries out into the dark. It’s progress at the very least, him sharing these worries with her.  

Leaving them to enjoy the night that’s finally fallen, Alex makes her way back to the facilities building and steps back through into the alley. Where Strand waits, watching wide-eyed as she returns and the sigil vanishes into the brickwork. Though she escaped the bloody nose, she can still feel the headache building behind her forehead.

“Why was there a rock on top of your stereo?”  

He blinks owlishly at her. What little color on his face drains away.

“The uh – the lid wouldn’t close. Charlie dropped it and the lid wouldn’t stay closed after that, so we had to weigh the top down for it to play a CD.”

He paces the alley, listening as she relays what else she saw: the University of Chicago shirt he wrapped the ice in, the baseball-sized dent in the pickup’s left fender.  

“I could have told you all of this before,” he reasons, more to himself than her. “When we were in Idaho, maybe.”  

“I think you would’ve told me before that you drove a Bronco. It’s not exactly the car I pictured you driving, even if it was the nineties.”  

“It wasn’t mine. I borrowed it from a friend to haul the camping equipment. We didn’t need a car where we lived in Chicago, since we took the L everywhere and–” he stops to run a hand across his mouth, “–and there’s just no way...” he glances her way and pauses in his pacing, his features softening as he crosses to her and holds out her coat. “You’re shivering. You weren't before, the – I’m sorry, I didn’t think…” he trails off as she slides the coat on and turns to face him.   

“Right now, you’re thinking too much.” She says it with affection, a soft smile spreading across her features as he flashes her a trademark frown.

“There’s no such thing.”   

Shifting her gaze from him, she suddenly becomes very interested in the view down the alley.  

“I’m sorry for what I said last night.” That frown deepens at her apology. “About you not being good enough to find Coralee. That was... uncalled for.”  

The corners of his lips bow up for a second before flattening out in a single line. He drags in a breath through his teeth, glancing to the street, and then back to her.  

“It’s – you’re not entirely wrong about what I felt back then. I was... it was a difficult time for me. Your assessment, though, was... accurate.”  

The moment settles between them.

“Come back with me,” she requests, breaking the silence. “To the studio. I want you to listen to my conversation with Simon, see if you can decipher any of his weird, archaic references.” Hesitation draws up his features, but he nods his assent. “Good.”

She knocks her shoulder into his side. “C’mon, let’s get out of this alley and into those heated seats of yours.”

 

\------

 

There’s a man in Alex’s office.  

Strand draws up short at the sight. He’d been expecting an empty room, somewhere that he can rest his thoughts for a while, since Nic had pulled Alex into giving a studio tour with Intern C out sick.  

He’d have to have a talk with the front desk about not sending strangers to wait in offices alone. Though he’d barely had the wherewithal to concentrate on what Coralee told him when she saved them from Warren, he had retained most of the information. Which included the possibility of unsavory people being interested in his and Alex’s work.

“Are you waiting for Miss Reagan?” he asks the man.  

“That depends.” The man twists in the chair to face Strand, a grin on his face. “Are you the ‘handsome doctor’ our mom has been nagging me about on the phone every Sunday?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Alex says from the doorway as she steps into the room and takes a seat at her desk, waving Strand to sit down in the other chair. “Looks like it’s your turn to deal with the constant matchmaking.”  

“She sent me a Facebook link to someone who lives down the street from me. How does she have that kind of reach from another country? When did she turn into Garcia from _Criminal Minds_?”

“Wait, how do you know where they live? Or....” she tilts her head and grins, the same maneuver she does when she teases Strand. It’s nice to see where it must’ve originated from.  

Her brother rolls his shoulders and flashes a grin, as if that’s all the answer she needs.  

“Oh, sorry, right. Perry, this is Richard – Richard, this is my brother, Perry.”

“We have different dads,” Perry says with a straight face. Alex rolls her eyes at the joke.  

Strand remembers seeing a family photo of the two, standing with an older couple on a dock. The scrawny boy with braids dressed in a ratty Canucks jersey is a far cry from the man in the tailored suit before him. Then again, so is Alex, who was hunched over, her dark hair falling half in front of her pimpled face, wearing leggings and an oversized Jasper National Park sweatshirt.  

Well, her fashion hasn’t changed that much.  

“When can I start telling embarrassing childhood stories? Or do I have to wait for Christmas for that?”  

Alex points to the door. “Out.”

“She told everyone in the fifth grade that she wasn’t a virgin because she thought that meant you were from the Virgin Islands.” Perry turns to his sister. “What did you tell them you were?”

“Canadian,” she answers, but she’s laughing as she says it. “Okay, you did the whole big brother schtick, you can leave now.”

“I fly all the way up from San Francisco and this is the welcome wagon I’m treated to.”

“It’s a two-hour flight.”

They argue about semantics, then about how much worse traffic is in their respective cities, then about a great number of things that pass over Strand's head.

“And why are you here, by the way?” Alex asks, circling the conversation back to the present and away from her brother complaining about his latest fling. 

“I was up in Kelowna, trying to solve an issue with the boat. Mom called last week in a fit, said that the marina is going under and the new owners don’t care about Harry’s deal with Dad or how good of friends they were. So, I’ve got to find a new place for the boat that won’t cost three arms and a leg.”

“Does your mother take the boat out often?” Strand asks.

Alex shakes her head. “She’ll be seventy-four next year, so no. And she doesn’t like being on it since Dad’s been gone.”

A brief silence passes between the two siblings.  

“Anyway... like I said, since I was already up north, I thought I’d drop in and treat you to an early birthday lunch.” Perry shoots a quick glance over at Strand, seated next to him, as if he’d forgotten he was there. “You haven’t said much.”

“I don’t see the point of intruding into a conversation that doesn’t warrant my opinion.”  

Alex’s face scrunches into something akin to skeptical humor. Perry chuckles at the two of them.  

It must be another Reagan thing, Strand considers, that quick burst of joy.  

“I like you,” Perry tells him before turning to his sister. “He’s coming to lunch, too.”  

Gathering her things, Alex glances over to make sure he’s fine with the sudden change in plans. Satisfied with his semi-answer when Strand gives her a small nod, Alex points at her brother.  

“Fine, but know that you’ve already reached your limit on embarrassing stories.”  

“Oh, come on – I at least have to tell him about Kelly Robinson’s pool party. It’s in the top five.”

Following the two bickering siblings out the door, Strand is prepared to bring up the line by himself. It’s a pleasant surprise when Alex drops back to hook her arm around his, so they can shuffle down the hallway together.  

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the subject of timelines and how confusing the canon one is: my HC is Strand was born in 1961, had Charlie when he was in his early twenties, making her birth year sometime around 1982-ish? Though Charlie's character in the podcast seems to sound/act younger than her actual age, for the sake of attempting to keep up with the ever-changing (read: inconsistent) canon, I kept her birthday the same. 
> 
>  
> 
> Terms / allusions:
> 
> DAN = Divers Alert Network
> 
> As I like to do with all of my TBTP stories, I slipped one (or two) TAZ references in.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Five: a study in me not wanting to break up a chapter into two smaller ones (mostly because I'm selfish, slightly because doing so resulted in a loss of story momentum).  
> Brief pre-chapter warning for violence.

Alex wonders what her bank must think of the constant charges to coffee shops in the greater Seattle area.  

This morning she’s in Georgetown, having scheduled a brief interview at the airport. The café she’s stopped at looks like Halloween threw up inside it. Orange string lights glow around the ceiling; jack-o’-lanterns, fake spider webs, and ghostly window decals cover every inch of available space. The specials board is a chalk drawing of a cartoon ghost drinking a coffee, the jagged script below reading: _Pumpkin Spook Latte $4.95!_

A soft trill from her pocket notifies her of a text from Strand, asking to meet with her this evening to discuss some information he’s found. He’d been unusually cordial yesterday, taking everything (her brief excursion to his past, meeting her brother and dealing with his innuendo-filled questions, and the two hour-long dissection of her and Simon’s conversation) in stride. Although they were on better terms, he’d left after the evening news with a promise to follow up with her today if he found anything, and a kiss on her cheek.   

At the sound of her name, Alex takes the coffee and bagel back outside. She’s rummaging through her purse for her keys when she stops just short of her car.

There’s a woman standing next to it.

Bundled into a yellow scarf and houndstooth-print coat, she looks harmless in every way but how she holds herself. Her blonde hair is pulled into a tight chignon, showing off the cut of her cheekbones and the line of her jaw. She could be waiting for someone, but the only other cars in the lot are closer to the building, and she’s staring straight at Alex. Her eyes are a startling hazel, a light brown flecked with deep green, noticeable even from several feet away. Alex has a brief recollection of a jogger who nodded hello to her on Sunday with those same brilliant eyes.  

“Miss Reagan?” Each syllable sounds like they’ve been clipped short.  

Dumbly, Alex nods her head before remembering she can speak. “Yes, I’m – who are you?”  

“You need to come with me.”  

The woman steps closer. A black SUV pulls into the lot and rolls to a stop behind them, blocking Alex from sight of the café patrons. The scene feels so familiar that she immediately glances around for Coralee, waiting for her to pop out from behind the bushes. But the street is deserted, full of parked cars with no passengers inside them to notice the attempted kidnapping.  

“No, thank you.” Alex shakes her head and starts backing away, trying to get out in the open and away from the vehicle.

The woman’s eyes narrow to slits. “If you want to live, come with me.”  

“No, no way in–”  

Another SUV roars up, headed straight for her. Alex screams, jumping back as the car hops the curb, blocking her escape. A hand clamps around her arm. The woman is pulling her towards the back door. Alex jerks back, before remembering the coffee in her trapped hand. She hopes that pretty coat is more for looks than protection. The woman gasps as the hot liquid drenches her front, but her grip stays steady. Alex panics, thrashing and kicking. She opens her mouth to scream, but the woman slams her fist into Alex’s face. Pain explodes across her upper lip and nose, the back of her head bouncing off the SUV.  

The world goes blurry.   

Alex throws up her knee, hoping to catch any part of the woman, but she skitters back just in time. She slams Alex against the car again and presses an arm across her chest, keeping her arms trapped below her. Something pretty and white comes up with her other hand, which she clamps around Alex’s nose and mouth. The sweet chemical smell fills her nostrils as Alex struggles, jerking her head back against the car in an attempt to get away, but the woman has her pinned.  

The woman’s features start to blur, her figure melting into the background of the empty street. A heavy weight pushes at Alex, urging her to close her eyes. The woman whispers something to her – it might be _I told you so_ , or _be quiet_ , but it all sounds like nonsense as Alex gives in to the chemical embrace of sleep.    

The chair she wakes up in is plush. Her neck throbs as she raises her head out of the cramped position against her chest. Reaching up to massage it, Alex notes with surprise that she isn’t tied down. Her hand immediately goes down to her coat pocket, her breath catching when there’s no answering bulky weight.  

The office she’s in looks like something that would cross her Pinterest feed. The brick walls are a cool white, covered sparsely with artwork. The desk in front of her is a vintage oak, held up by steel hairpin legs and decorated with knick-knacks: a porcelain bird paper weight, a little wooden carving of a maze, a star sculpture made of thin wire. It’s all very mid-century modern meets industrial loft, something she’d probably admire in a glossy magazine.

For some reason, the stylish taste of it all is more frightening than if she’d woken up in an abandoned airplane hangar or the trunk of a car. Isn’t that how kidnappings are supposed to work? None of Ian Rankin’s novels prepared her for being held in an Instagram influencer’s high-rise office.  

Behind her, a door opens and closes.  

Her coping mechanisms grind to a halt. Footsteps make their way towards her, the floorboards whining every few feet as they come closer. Wanting to be in control of the first contact with her kidnapper, Alex twists to watch as they approach.  

Thomas Warren lifts a finger at her in greeting from where he’s gripping a paper coffee cup. He’s dressed in a gray suit that looks as if it were sculpted on, his blonde curls perfectly tossed, his charming grin in place.

Alex wants nothing more than to draw a sigil underneath his feet and watch him plummet off the side of a mountain.  

A woman trails in behind him and it takes Alex a few moments to recognize her – she's since changed into a white pantsuit that probably costs more than Alex’s rent. She feels a spark of pride that she was the reason for the wardrobe change in the first place. It’s not lost on her, either, the statement with the all-white outfit. She can spot a challenge when she sees it.  

Warren clears his throat to bring her attention back to him.

“Can I have Tessa bring you anything to drink? Tea, water?”    

“Coffee,” Alex says, enjoying the way Tessa’s pretty eyes narrow at her. Warren takes a seat behind the desk and flaps a hand at Tessa, who steps out, leaving the two of them alone.  

“How have you been, Alex?”  

“Why did you kidnap me?”  

They ask in tandem. Warren chuckles; Alex raises an eyebrow. Her upper lip throbs in time with her heartbeat. She resists touching a hand to it, to see if it’s as swollen as it feels.   

“I invited you.”

“Your assistant punched me in the face and knocked me out.” She narrows her gaze as she adds, “And she stole my recorder. I want it back.”

Warren’s lips twitch as she talks, as if the scene playing before him is humorous. “Well, the invitation was implied, then. And don’t worry, it’ll be returned after we’re finished here. I couldn’t risk you spoiling my plans with your audience.”  

“What do you want?”  

He takes a lengthy pause to sip at his coffee, watching her over the cup’s rim. “You’re such a journalist. Always getting straight to the crux of it, aren’t you? I listened to your show, you know.” At her silence, he continues, “I was intrigued with the description you gave about me. ‘Ridiculously hot.’ That kind of talk is usually left to the teen bloggers.”  

“You didn’t drag me here for small talk, so get on with it please.”  

She receives another flashy smile that would’ve made her go weak-kneed in a coffee shop years ago. Now it just makes her even more pissed off. The headache knocking at the inside of her skull increases its tempo, as if in agreement. She’s in no mood for the theatrics, or for playing on the little stage he’s set.  

“I like you.” He tilts his head in a way that makes her think of someone critiquing fine art, but there’s a gleam to his eyes that unsettles her. “I knew I would. Makes me wish you were brought on earlier as planned.”

Alex resists the urge to squirm under his scrutiny. “What do you mean?”

“I’m curious. Do you remember who came up with the idea for the first episode to be about paranormal investigators?”  

“It wasn’t the first–”

“Correct,” he interrupts. “You were going to make it about search and rescue workers, but decided to make that episode three.” Impossibly, his grin widens at her obvious suspicion.  

“How do you–”

“Your intern. She’s the one who mentioned how popular horror movies were. You took that nugget and ran with it.”

“You’re suggesting... what? That she was a plant?”  

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. She stayed long enough to make sure Richard finally called back. Then I moved her on.”

Alex shakes her head, recalling the young intern with the loud laugh and the cute peep-toe heels; the one who gave everyone a ride home one snowy afternoon because she was the only one with a car that could handle the icy roads.   

“She moved. She had family in Tucson, they were sick,” Alex protests.

His mouth pulls up to one corner as he shrugs. “She’s in Santa Fe now, working on another project. Maybe she can pop over and see them soon.”  

“But even if you did all of that, you have no way of knowing that I’d interview Richard.”

“I knew you were thorough. Your investigation and subsequent interview with Jeffery Carroll made that obvious, even years ago. You’re the only reason they found the youngest daughter’s remains. I knew you’d dig until you came across Richard’s name enough times to warrant an interview request. And what an interview that would be, with the mysterious Doctor Richard Strand, Yale graduate and possible wife killer. The tags on the episode alone would put you up on the charts.”

Three brief knocks at the door announce Tessa’s return. The coffee she hands Alex has all the correct marks on the side. It’s the latte she orders every morning at the shop down from the studio.   

“Let me put this into terms you might understand,” Warren continues once Tessa exits the room, leaving them alone once again. “When you’re fishing, you know that bait isn’t bait if it’s floating there in the water, not moving, easily obtainable. You have to jerk it around. Move it about, make the fish work for it. Make it enticing.”

“I’m the fish in this scenario,” she infers.

“Of course. So, I throw you a scrap every now and then. A few breadcrumbs on top of the water to get your attention. To pull you in.”  

Alex’s brow wrinkles, frustrated with his metaphors. “For what purpose, though? To get closer to Richard?”

“In the beginning, that was the idea. I thought I needed his blood, but technology has come a long way. He’s no longer required in that aspect.”

“Everything we found, though – it all pointed to him. His father’s notes–”  

“You’ve never heard of a red herring?” Warren smirks as he picks up one of the decorations off the desk and plays with it.  

Alex watches the wooden maze move back and forth between his hands, wanting nothing more than to doubt what he’s saying. It feels as if the rug of the last two years has been pulled out from under her.

“But all of the documents, and the Horn of Tiamat...”

It all makes sense, though. All of the dead-ends and the lack of connections, the information that seemingly fell into her lap at certain points.   

“Like I said, I needed to keep you enticed. Keep you searching until it could come to fruition.”

Until she figured out that she could bilocate, Alex assumes. “You mean us going to Prestwick, and finding that wall.”

“Yes, though that was only one part of the sum of the whole.” Placing the decoration down, he leans his crossed arms onto the desk and regards her for a moment. “Are you a student of history, Alex?”  

At her silence, he flashes her a quick smile, as if they’re sharing a private joke. “No, that’s right – broadcast journalism. Well, I assume you took one or two history courses during your time at college. Though I’m betting none of your textbooks discussed what I’m about to uncover.”

“Which is?”

At her question, he shakes his head and clucks his tongue at her. Though the desk is several feet away, she’s sure the coffee in her hand could reach him if needed. Because she’s grown very tired of the cheeky villain role he’s playing.  

“If I told you that, it would take all the fun away from the big finale I’ve planned. All you need to know is that I need you to open a door for me. If you do, then I can guarantee you a place with me. A chance to separate yourself from the people that walk with their heads downwards. To hone your true self. And a possible chance at immortality.”

Knowing about his past history with Luciternica and their exorcism machines, Alex finds that his word choice piques her interest. She recalls her interview with Francis Dreiser – the one that feels light-years away now. He’d talked about demons needing a middle man, someone to grant them access to this world through a portal. _They don’t work like doors_ , he’d said.

She wants to laugh at the thought, at the irony of it all, but she stows it away for later – when she’s not being held captive by a _GQ_ -cover cult leader.  

“You want me to open a door,” she repeats.  

“Yes.”

“What do you want me to let in?”  

“That will be explained to you all in good time,” he replies, evading the question.  

“I met with Simon Reese on Monday. He gave me the impression that someone was having him look into me, spy on me – does he work for you?”

“Simon works for something beyond what any of us can see. But he’s a special boy – definitely someone you want on your side.”

“Is he the Advocate?”  

“Shouldn’t you be asking if I’m the Adversary?”  

Alex thinks she already knows the answer to that. “If you’re wanting a signed confession,” he continues, feigning a pout, “I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“There is no Advocate. There is no Adversary,” she argues. “You slipped those words into the narrative to make this whole thing seem so self-important, to throw accusations around by hiding behind aliases.”

He goes quiet for a moment. By the next beat, though, his mask is firmly back in place.  

“I can see why Richard likes you – he's always gone for the assertive ones. Although, whether he wants to join us is up to him.”

“There is no us,” Alex tells him with a shake of her head. “And you’re deflecting. You didn’t drug and kidnap me to talk about him. Leave him out of this.”

“I’m going to need him for just a little while longer, unfortunately,” Warren admits as he leans back in his chair. “Because if you don’t follow my instructions – if you don’t give me what I want, I’ll kill him.”  

He speaks with an unusual lack of display that she’s come to expect from him, the pomp and circumstance gone from his voice. The cold tone reminds her of their first meeting, of his stilted answers to her questions. Back when she thought he was just a weird, attractive fan with a possible lead and poor communication skills.  

She narrows her gaze at him, trying to suss this new Warren out.

“I don’t believe you.”

Something dark settles behind his eyes as they meet hers. At first, she reads it as humor, as if the whole situation and threat against Strand is a funny joke.  

But Alex has seen that dark flicker before. In the foster mother who forced her into the dark, rat-infested basement when she’d had enough of her, in her childhood friend Tori’s older brother who cornered her in his room when their parents were gone, in Jeffery Carroll when he sat across from her at that prison and recounted the pleas of the girls he murdered up in the Cascade Mountains.

“You’d do well to believe me, Alex. Travis Collingwood certainly didn’t. Look where he is. He developed morals and argued with my orders. Now he’s rotting away in plot seven-twenty-two at Sterchi Memorial Cemetery in Evanston, Illinois. You can go visit him, if you want.”

 _No need_ , she wants to say,  _he already visited me_.  

“Travis was a plant, too? For the Institute?”  

It’s a surprise, but she finds it’s not the most outlandish thing she’s heard today. Warren gives a half-hearted shrug at her question.

“He outlived his usefulness. Just like Maddie Franks.” The name brings that same ugly, orange extension cord to the front of her mind, the bloated body swaying gently from it. “You knew it wasn’t a suicide. No one can hang themselves from a ceiling fan. You researched that, looked it up, even asked the medical examiner, didn’t you? And they told you...” he trails off, rolling his hand into the air to signal her to finish his sentence.  

“No,” Alex says, swallowing back the film of saliva that’s gathered in her throat. “They said it would’ve ripped the fan out of the ceiling, if she’d hung herself. The force of the short fall would’ve been enough to... for it to not work.”  

Pleasure, sick and delighted, spreads across Warren’s features as he smiles, watching her stutter over her words.  

“Fourteen to sixteen people die every year from carbon monoxide poisoning by simply sitting in their cars. I wonder the last time Richard had that car of his inspected. And those buildings in Italy, most of them aren’t up to code. I know that Charlie likes to buy candles from _La Luce_ – that’s a shop near her apartment. It would be unfortunate for her fire alarm to fail. And while we’re on the subject of fire alarms, do you think Perry checked your mother’s when he was up there?”  

“Stop,” Alex demands, clawing her fingers into the chair, imagining her nails tearing that incessant smirk off his face.  

He stands up and comes around the desk, leaning against it with his arms crossed, looking as if he’s waiting to be put on a magazine cover.

“Trust me, Alex. Once you see what I’m planning, I think you’ll change your tune. You’ll want to be part of it. It’s in your nature.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

He smiles fondly, goading her with the knowledge that he, in fact, does know quite a bit. Certainly more than she herself does. Instead of taking the bait, he calls for Tessa, who returns promptly to wait beside him.  

“Tessa here will see you out. She’ll come collect you when everything is ready. And in the meantime, I’d like you to focus on honing your skill. No outside distractions. I’ll be watching.” He takes a step and bends to meet her gaze, reaching out to stroke two fingers down her cheek. The one Tessa punched into the side of a vehicle. Alex smacks his hand away, wishing for all the world she didn’t feel five years-old when he merely chuckles at her for it. “And, if I find you aren’t following my instructions, you already know what the consequences will be.”  

“I assume you don’t want me to inform Richard of any of this.”

Tessa moves to stand over Alex, her hands clasped around her back, hidden from view. A burly man enters the corner of her vision on her other side. It’s obvious that this impromptu interview is about to be cut short.

Tessa’s hand shoots out and there’s an answering prick in Alex’s shoulder. The details of the room fuzz as the sedative works its way through her system. The cup in her hand hits the floor and she watches, mesmerized as the coffee splatters across the wood.  

“No, go ahead,” Warren encourages her, the words spoken through a grin that Alex can no longer see. The dark liquid seeps across the floor, her vision dimming as the rest of the room falls away into the creeping darkness. “Tell Richard I said hello.”

 

\------

 

Relay is barking.

Reflexively, Alex goes to call his name until she registers her surroundings. She’s in her bedroom, laid out on the bed with her favorite throw tucked in around her. Before she has time to contemplate the creepy implications of Warren’s assistant (or Warren himself) being in her bedroom while she was unconscious, Relay lets out another growl.  

Swinging her legs over the side, Alex wobbles as she tries to stand, catching herself on the nightstand as the room spins around her, a carnival ride of books and plants and clothes. Outside her open door, the short hallway is lit only by the late afternoon sun that drifts in from behind the living room’s blinds. Eyeing the shadowy corners of her home, Alex finds nothing amiss. She continues out into the main space, using the furniture to help keep her upright. Relay spins from the front door and over to her, then races back to the door, barking all the while. She hisses his name, motioning for him to come back, her gaze darting around for anyone lying in wait.  

She considers how she shouldn’t be afraid of someone coming in her front door, since she was already kidnapped once today. What, are they going to kidnap her again? _Sorry, we forgot to also threaten your dog, can we have a do over?_ she thinks to herself, swallowing a nervous chuckle when she hears a noise.

Muffled voices sound from the other side of the front door.  

Backing up to the kitchen, she grabs a knife from the block and brandishes it as the handle jiggles, metal scraping metal as a key slides in. She advances as the lock turns and clicks, the door swinging in.  

Standing on the other side of the doorway are Strand and Nic, surprise evident on their faces, as if they didn’t expect her to be in her own home.

The hand holding the knife falls to her side.

“What happened? Where have you been?” Strand strides forward, disregarding the knife as he grasps her shoulders and pulls her into a tight embrace. Alex feels a shaky breath work its way through him as his hands skate up and down her back, unable to keep still.    

“And what’s with the knife?” Nic asks, holding out a hand to take it as Strand pulls back. They take one look at her and whatever they see – the bruised cheek, the glassy eyes, the way she starts to tilt to one side – causes them to usher her over to the couch.  

“Your contact called the studio when you didn’t show for the interview–”  

 _Fuck you twice over, Warren_ , she thinks to herself, damning him to hell again for good measure. She’d worked hard to arrange that interview, too.

“Shit. Were they angry? I can meet with them tomorrow, if they’re still in–”

“Alex.” Strand cuts her off, rubbing circles against her back. “Tell us what happened.”

She does, but only after insisting that Nic go home, and that Strand take her and Relay back to his place. The idea of staying here makes her uneasy, especially when she knows that Warren’s goons have already been inside when they were carting in her unconscious body.  

And though it’s obvious Strand doesn’t want to wait to find out what happened, he does at her insistence. Wrapping her in his coat, he bundles her and Relay into his car. He plays soft eighties ballads all the way back to his house in Burien, keeping her hand in his as the drugs sweep her under again.  

There are three little words on the edge of her tongue (that she blames on the sedative still coursing through her system) when she wakes up to the gentle sway of being carried as they cross his lawn.    

“Tell me,” Strand urges, once they’re inside. He’s plied a cup of tea into her hands and wrapped a blanket around her, as if being kidnapped requires the same treatment as having the flu.  

Sitting at the kitchen island, she watches him flit around the room, throwing things into a pot on the stove.

When he’s stressed, he cooks, which is a craft Alex wishes she could manifest her worries into. (Instead, she goes to Target at 8 p.m. and loads a shopping cart to give her guest bathroom its bi-annual makeover.) “I don’t want you to keep something important from me because you’re worried I won’t believe you.”

Relay is circling through the living room behind her, giving the house its routine sniff, his nails tip-tapping against the floor. Over the sink, the picture window shows off the sunset that filters through the backyard, the warm lights of Vashon Island across the water barely visible through the trees. Alex keeps her eyes on the lights, deciding how much she wants to tell.

“That’s not it,” she admits. “At least not this time.”

Seemingly satisfied with the simmering pot, Strand crosses the distance to pull her close and tuck her head against his chest.  

“I may not understand a lot of this and, if I can be honest, there’s times still when I want to doubt it,” he says, running his fingers through her hair as he does. “But I’m all in. Tell me what happened. Please.”

So, she does. And though she’s tempted to leave certain things out, she keeps them in for the sake of transparency, and for his own sake. If something were to happen, if Warren’s plan for her were to go south, Strand needs to know what he’s up against – in the event Warren changes his mind about needing him.

“He’s lying. After he uses you for whatever he needs, he’s not going to need you anymore, and he’s going to–” Strand struggles to keep what little composure he has left. All he wants to do now is drive to the Daiva Corp building downtown and set it ablaze with Warren inside, watch as the flames eat at each and every floor.

“I know.” The tea is cold now, but she keeps a firm grip on the cup to give her restless hands something to do while he paces back and forth across the kitchen.  

“You seem to be rather accepting of it.” He turns from the window, his arms crossed. “But I’m not.”

“Of course I’m not okay with it but – but Richard,” her voice breaks on the end of his name, “what else am I supposed to do?”  

The cracks in her steadfast resolve begin to crumble. She digs her fingers into the blanket covering her arms, matching his stance, trying to hold herself together. “I don’t want this. I want to go back. I want to be back with you in Olympia, and we decide to not go to that tunnel and instead we come back here and have dinner and a bottle of wine and we never learn about liminal spaces or bilocation. But other than going back and leaving myself a note that I’ll likely think is just my crazy nightmare-self being paranoid, if that _would_ even work... I don’t know what to do. And I wish I did because it’s not just me in danger. It’s you and Charlie, and Perry and my mom, and he didn’t say it, but probably Ruby, and Coralee, wherever she is.”   

Warm hands encase hers around the cup, bringing her out of her thoughts. She didn’t even notice him cross the room.  

“Alex,” he interrupts, that deep baritone of his gentle as he replaces the cup with his own hand for her to grasp. “You don’t need to worry about me. And Charlie, she knows how to take care of herself, as does Ruby – she grew up in the south side of Chicago. And I’ve never met your mother but I assume she’s a smart woman, too. They all are.”

Tipping forward into his chest, she tucks her face into the curve of his neck and drags in a shaky breath. His stubble scratches at her skin, but she ignores it. Instead, she sinks deeper into his arms as they come up to hold her against him, his palms rubbing soothing circles against her back.  

They’d talked once about what kept them each from acting on their feelings. Strand had admitted that he was fearful of her safety, that getting involved with him was too risky. Alex isn’t sure how she feels, now that the tables have turned, now that Strand is the one in the line of fire. She’s overwhelmed with understanding, though, for Strand and his steadfast hesitation that he showed over the months before that night under the stars in Idaho.  

“I’m sorry.” The words are muffled as her lips move against his collar. “Our first meeting feels dirtied now, knowing it was all an elaborate scheme. You never asked for any of this. It’s clear now that Warren continued to use you to get to me, because somehow he knew before all of this what I could do. If I could go back, I could – maybe I could fix all of this. Everything, I mean. I wouldn’t break your trust by recording you and Amalia. I could try harder with the Hochman’s – make them understand, make them _see_ what Maddie was doing, and Maddie, I could–” the breath she inhales rattles through her chest as she tries to collect herself, to stop the runaway train of her thoughts, “–I could’ve helped her, before it led to... and I could’ve stopped it. All of it. Even, well, even maybe Coralee and her disappearance, I could–”

Tightening his hold on her, Strand makes a noise of disagreement, one she can feel rumble from deep within his chest where she leans against it.  

“Stop,” he tells her. “You can’t think like that. It would drive you insane, thinking of everything terrible or unfair that’s ever happened, thinking that you can fix it. It’s just not possible. The universe is too wild to think that going back and changing one small aspect in time can change the future for the better. Alex Reagan can’t solve all of the world’s problems.”  

He pauses to press a kiss against her hair. “And I want you to stop blaming yourself for threats made by that degenerate. If you didn’t have this... ability, he’d still be coming after me for my blood or my knowledge or any other reason he saw fit.” His hand resumes its movement against her back. “The only thing I’m worried about is making sure you’re safe.”

She gives him the most rudimentary of nods as she tips her head down against his chest, inhaling the scent of his laundry detergent and aftershave, trying to listen to whatever he’s telling her. The desire to stay awake is short-lived as her eyelids refuse to open, the last of the drug tugging the warm blanket of sleep over her head.

 

\------

 

A soft scritching sounds from nearby as Alex peeks around the afghan covering her.  

While she was asleep, the evening gave way to the night. The living room is lit by the gas fireplace and the odd abundance of lamps that Strand owns, one of which he sits beside, the shade tilted to let light flood onto the book he’s reading. The noise comes from his pen as it moves across the legal pad he’s propped on the chair’s arm. His laptop, open and idle, sits perched on a healthy stack of books, loose leaf paper sticking out from their pages. Jazz plays from the record player in the corner, though it’s too low for her to make out much more than the occasional sour note of the piano.     

“What are you reading?”  

His pen jumps across the paper at her question, his gaze shooting up so he can look her over. Strand tips the book up to show her the cover, which is nothing but the title in gold, embossed letters. She emerges from the nest of blankets, tilting her head a degree and squinting at the words.

“ _The Complete History of Eighth Century Italy_ ,” he reads for her sake, overwhelmed by how charming she looks, sleep-rumpled and curious, her hair a staticky mess.

Alex lets out a soft snort at the title. “Sounds like a real page-turner.”    

“I do feel like I’m cramming for a Middles Ages one-oh-one class right now,” he admits as he waves a hand toward the tower of books on the table.  

The recorder slides from her jacket pocket and onto the table, where she switches it on. Tessa must have returned it to her at some point during the trip home.   

“Are you telling me _the_ Doctor Richard Strand crammed for tests?”

“Even us enigmatics are prone to slacking off sometimes.” He caps his pen and slides the pad into the book to keep his place as he talks. “But to answer your question, I’m researching some of the references Simon made. He mentioned a ‘navel of the earth,’ which has two ties in ancient Greece. The first of which is an omphalos, a religious stone artifact, typically placed at point of power. Greek legend states that Zeus sent two eagles across the world, both going the opposite direction, to find its center, or its ‘navel,’ and when they met, he placed a stone there.”  

Alex perks up at the semi-familiar term. “I interviewed that book collector last year, Brenda Miller – she mentioned something similar. Where was this so-called ‘navel’?”

“In Delphi. Though, keep in mind that these are the Greeks we’re talking about.” That wry smile appears as he continues, “So them believing the center of the world was in their own backyard isn’t astonishing. The second reference is a notion the Greeks had back in 700 BCE, of the earth having access points to the supposed underworld.”

“I heard about that when I was on vacation there a few years ago. I was visiting friends in Patras and they told me about a necro... something or other.” Alex tilts her head and squints, trying to pull the name from her memory. “But it was an hour outside of the city, so I passed it up.”

“You’re referring to the Necromanteion, which translates to ‘Oracle of the Dead.’ It was a temple dedicated to necromancy, and to Hades and Persephone. Although new evidence has come forth that the site found in Mesopotamos may have been an agricultural tower, and not a place to commune with the deceased. So, it’s just as good that you left it off the itinerary.”    

Having tapped him into that academic well, Alex listens as he spends the next few minutes explaining the reason behind the book on medieval Italy. How there was a chance the Greeks had it wrong, and that there was more than one navel of the earth. Bringing the laptop back to life, he pulls up a map of western Italy and points to a small area just south of Pozzuoli.  

Once the ancient city of Baiae, the lower portion was now underwater, the statues and buildings left to crumble in the salty water of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In the 1960s, archaeology hobbyist Robert Paget uncovered a tunnel system that ran in and around the cliffs of the city. Due to its close proximity to the Phlegraean Fields and Lake Avernus, which was thought to be an entrance to hell (mostly propagated by Virgil’s  _Aeneid_ ), Baiae was rumored to be the location of the River Styx. This was due to the underground river that ran through the tunnels, the water thought to be holy. The mystery of the water deepened further when there was discovered to be no known outfall location, courtesy of Paget’s many experiments with dye and ping pong balls, none of which appeared in any of the nearby waterways. An archaeologist who ventured inside claimed that there were caves at the end of these tunnels, but most of them had been sealed off by the Romans to dissuade anyone looking to venture inside.  

“You think Simon was talking about this cave?” Alex asks in an attempt to circle back.

“I can’t be sure, since there are dozens of reported sites, including a more popular one in Turkey. The reason I lean more towards this location is because of his comment about the tapestry.”

“The ‘warm spot on the tapestry’?”

“Right.” Strand clicks over to the photos folder and opens _Italy 2016_ , scrolling down before pushing the screen closer to her. It’s a photo of a sandstone wall with a twenty-foot hole in the center of it, as if someone knocked a wrecking ball through it. Outside the wall, the foreground is a brilliant blue, the water of the bay decorated with the green mounds of distant land. “This is Aragonese Castle, just off the coast of Naples. In late 2016, acidic steam from an opening in the volcanic rock under the island caused the wall to break apart, resulting in this hole. That, incidentally, grants a direct view northeast, to Baiae.”

“Okay, that covers the warm spot part, I guess. But what about the tapestry?”

“A tapestry depicting the Ishtar Gate, which was part of the walls of Babylon – once considered one of the original seven wonders of the world – used to hang there. It was damaged in the explosion. Ishtar, who was primarily referred to as Inanna, was a Mesopotamian goddess. She was mainly associated with beauty, sex, and power.”

Alex interrupts with a comment about Michelle Pfeiffer, earning a flat look from Strand before he continues.

“Her popularity eventually influenced a late number of goddesses, including the Greek’s beloved Aphrodite. Which is how the recreation of the gate came to be on a tapestry in the castle, when the Greeks took over in the seventh century.”  

He pauses in his academic spiel to search for a photo of the gate’s replica in Berlin. The replica is massive, towering high within the museum. Glazed tiles of deep cobalt, light cerulean, and golden bronze form images of bulls, lions, and other creatures along its surface.

“I have to say I’m surprised that they kept another culture’s famed art,” Alex admits. “At least, until Mother Nature intervened. I always thought the Greeks were very... arrogant with their own self-interest.”

“Well, it’s possible the tapestry was stolen, if only to be used to keep the castle interior warm, given the lack of insulation of stone walls.”  

She chuckles at the surprisingly simple reason for the tapestry as he continues on about the progression of Mesopotamian mythology. Watching him, she enjoys the sight of mythology professor Doctor Strand as he pulls up maps and photos and timelines of how their polytheistic belief system influenced their agricultural impact, so at home in his element of academia.  

He should be insisting that she leave, putting as much space between them as possible, given what she’s told him and what their experiences with Warren thus far have been. The idea that she could walk into his house next week and find him strung up in the living room, just as she found Maddie, is too horrific to contemplate. Yet, here he is, skimming through an article to show her examples on how these same ideas transferred over to the Babylonians.   

“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly, pausing his lecture. “Your episodes run an average of forty-five minutes and I spent twenty minutes talking about ancient deities.”  

“It’s fine.” Alex offers him a half-hearted smile, hoping he won’t see through it (he will, but she can hope). “I’m imagining how you’d look behind a podium, riveting your students with this enthusiasm you have.”

Strand cocks an eyebrow. “Not riveting enough to win their attention over their Twitter feed, but... thank you. You should come sit in on one of my classes. Most of my students have googled me, so therefore they know of you. They ask about you and the show all the time. Far too much during class time, really.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, feigning a yawn to excuse away her suddenly watery eyes. “That would be nice.”

Something in her voice must tip him off, though, because he’s setting down the textbooks, his brows pinched with worry.  

“Are you sure you’re–”

“I’m – I should go call Amalia. I’m going to have her look into my biological parents for me. It’s almost seven a.m. there in Moscow, so she’ll have had her coffee and be more welcoming to doing me a favor.” She tries for a reassuring smile, but from the look on his face, it must fall flat too.

“Oh. All right, then.”

Alex feels his eyes on her as she scurries out of the living room and into the bathroom.  

Amalia is two cups in and pleased to hear from Alex. She even says so, in that gravelly morning voice of hers that takes Alex back to many memorable mornings under the covers in her off-campus apartment (and a few times last year in her current rental). For now, Alex leaves out the kidnapping adventure with Warren, and simply requests for her to dig up anything she can on her past. Amalia agrees, though with the caveat that Alex must promise to explain everything to her when she’s not busy contemplating something stupid. Even over the phone and five-thousand miles away, she always seems to be able to read Alex like a book.  

It’s one of those annoying qualities Strand and she seem to share.

Ending the call, Alex stares at her reflection in the mirror and wipes at the tears collecting in her eyes. She takes a deep breath and sets her shoulders back, steeling her resolve.  

The marker lines are thick and crooked, her hand shaking as she draws the sigil and the two circles around it – so she can come back and make sure this works. And if this works, it will do much more than create the mess that Tannis warned her of.  

Before she can hesitate, she puts her hand to the drawing and steps into the parking lot beside the Rainier Beach Library. Once inside, she requests a guest pass at the front desk and moves straight to the computers. The browser loads the homepage, which features the headline:  _Kerry to host Cuba foreign minister in Washington on Monday_.  

Keeping the message concise, she sends the email, slumping back into the chair at the cheery _Message sent!_ pop-up. Determined not to cry in the middle of a public library, Alex logs off and rounds the building to where the sigil waits.         

The return is fuzzy, as if she’s trying to fit a key into a door while drunk, but she makes it back. The bathroom is the same as it was, with its striped hand towels and fancy soap, but that could be because Strand still relocated to Seattle.  

She opens the door.

Strand is leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, a stern expression in place.  

“Hi.”

“How was your trip?”

“Um. Unsuccessful, it appears.” He raises a single eyebrow at the statement. “I sent you an email.”

She can tell he’s sifting through memories, trying to recall. Recognition blooms in his eyes, but not with the usual warmth or ferocity that she typically sees when he’s made an important connection. This is... different.     

“The email.”

“Yeah.”

“The one that was sent as a warning to stay away from you. The one I took to be a prank and deleted.”

She reigns in the need to squirm under his stare. “That one, yeah.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs, the tight lines of his body loosening as he does.  

“How did you manage to convince yourself – you know what, never mind.” She expects him to turn around and leave her standing there in the hallway, knows it would be fully justified after she tried to change their future, to sweep all of this away as if it never happened.  

Instead, he moves forward and wraps his arms around her, crushing her against him. “You’re an idiot. Please tell me what made you think that would’ve been for the best.”

“You can’t keep acting like this isn’t a big deal,” she tells him, tipping her head down so her words aren’t muffled into his shirt. His arms tighten around her. “This isn’t like before, where he showed up just to steal your coffee, or had people break into our cars. He was involved with Maddie Franks's death, the one the police classified as a suicide. He orchestrated Travis Collingwood’s death, had him killed for disobeying his orders.”

“Alex–”

She cuts him off, shaking her head. “No, you don’t – I don’t want to be responsible for your death. My – none of this is worth your life.”

“Listen to me. You...” his words fade to a sigh that wells from deep within his chest.  

A fist of disbelief wraps itself around his heart and squeezes. He’s unable to comprehend how she could think that she isn’t worth it. How she’s unable to see that she’s the rope he clings to, when the murky waters of his past threaten to pull him under; the steadfast beacon of light that protects him from the dark as the unexplained knocks again and again at his door. She’s not perfect, of course, having withstood the waves for so long, having let them drum away at her resolve and her peace of mind. But still, here she stays.

He loves her all the more for it.

“Alex, you would be worth any risk. And Warren, whatever he does or says can’t get in the way of what all of this is about. Us.”

She makes a questioning noise, not trusting her voice. Strand drops a kiss to her hair before continuing.  “I listened to your show recently – all of it, in fact. And at some point, I realized that it also became about you. You’re at the center of this with me, yes?”  

Alex tips back in his arms to meet his gaze. “Yes.”

“Then whatever happens, you have to know you can trust me. We have to watch over each other. I understand your fears. If something were to happen to you...” he shakes his head, as if he’s banishing the thought from his mind, and then leans across the space between them to press a kiss against her temple, squeezing her tighter for a beat. “We’ll figure this out, but only if there’s trust between us. And that goes both ways – you trust me to help you, and I trust you to include me in your decisions. Don’t shut me out. Please.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” she snorts.  

“I know,” he says, with all of the weight of their history in the two words.

Jazz notes drift down the hallway to them, mixed in with Relay’s rhythmic snores.

“Does this mean that you’re willing to go on record and say you believe that I can bilocate?” she jokes.  

“Despite every logical reason saying I shouldn’t – I do believe you, with the highest certainty that I can offer.”  

And what a reality-altering decision that had been for him this morning, when he'd taken the time to sit down and fully assess the situation. Such a realization led to another, more painful one. That not coming clean about himself, about how he can accurately guess the ending of a book or a movie or a trip or a life, and maybe it wasn’t a guess, but more of an (albeit resistant) knowing... all that was going to cost him, when all the cards were flipped and spread out for Alex to read. He’d accepted it, though. And, for the time being, simply shoved the would-be confession deeper into his personal Pandora’s jar of deceptions, and screwed the lid on tight.

But the panic of having the world’s reality as he knew it pulled out from under him had dulled when Nic called about Alex, saying things like _never showed up_ and _abandoned car_ and _missing_. For several heartbeats, he was back there in Lake Tahoe; he could hear the gravel crunching underneath the tires as he pulled over, feel the harsh wind of passing cars as he yelled Coralee’s name into the darkened tree line.

The idea that the same could happen to Alex, that he could live another twenty years without ever knowing what happened to her, too – well, he hopes that Nic doesn’t hold a grudge against him for the things he said on the way to Alex’s house the second time, to check again if she’d somehow gotten home on her own.  

He still isn’t sure how to answer Nic’s questions on how he’d known to head north from the coffee shop, to circle a particular block downtown, and when to head back to her house again. He’s hoping that, in all of the chaos, the other man has forgotten.  

And to know that Alex went back to try and change everything to keep him and his family safe – to convince him to ignore the twelfth and thirteenth phone calls and never have that annoying first interview and the less-so annoying second interview and then all of the interviews after those and then everything after that – it’s a difficult thought to process.   

To think that he came close to losing her and not even knowing it. That he could have passed her on the street, known her only as a stranger. That he would have looked longingly at her, and never known the knowledge of their time together, never known it was her he was seeking.  

Or he could have never seen her at all. Either one is too painful to contemplate.

“How did you know I was gone?” Alex asks.

“I came to check on you, and when you didn’t answer, I opened the door and saw... you.” Strand sighs. “But then I saw the two circles. So, I knew you were coming back.”

 

\------

 

Tapping send on the email, Strand waits for the muffled noise of the sent confirmation before he sets his phone on the nightstand. Beside him, Alex snuffles in her sleep, her hand gripping the duvet draped across her waist. Slipping quietly underneath the covers, he takes her hand and settles it between them on the bed. He traces the dips between her fingers, watching her sleep, waiting for it to claim him so he can have a break from the thoughts stirring inside his brain.  

A soft ding sounds from his phone.  

_Understood. Concern isn’t warranted. I will contact you if the need arises. Please look over attachments._

The first attachment is a photo of a poem, the rest of the stanzas blacked out save for two:  

_Names called out across the water,_

_names I called you behind your back,_

_sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable,_

_shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,_

_or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,_

_or caught in the throat like a lump of meat._

_I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?_

_Sure enough._  

_I’ll use my body like a ladder, climbing_

_to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh,_

_farewell to everything caught underfoot_

_and flattened._

The second attachment is a PDF file of a petition of presumed death in absentia form. All of the boxes are blank, except for the missing individual’s name that's already been filled in: Coralee J. Strand.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was also a study in trying not to shove Warren into that stereotypical villain box, but also not making him as boring as the second time Alex interviewed him in S3.  
> And, completely off-topic, but every wikia page and mention of Travis has his last name spelled as Collinwood, but I definitely hear a 'g' in there. So, his name isn't misspelled here, but is my interpretation of the audio. 
> 
>  
> 
> Terms / allusions:
> 
> "People that walk with their heads downwards." from _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_
> 
> Strand's personal Pandora's jar uses the original translation of the object, which was incorrectly translated to box, believed to be courtesy of Erasmus. Strand's monologue to himself about passing Alex on the street and not recognizing her is inspired by Walt Whitman's _To a Stranger_ poem.
> 
> Coralee's poem is _Saying Your Names_ by Richard Siken, though I messed a bit with the stanzas I chose.


	6. Chapter 6

Keeping a running count in her head, Alex mentally jots down the number four as she crosses the street, trying to juggle the coffee and sandwich and conversation with her mom all at the same time.  

The intern that Nic sent off with her under the ruse of getting coffee for the office (when obviously they’re just someone to keep an eye on her) offered to hold the sandwich. Alex declined, having perfected the art of carrying too many things back when she was an intern.  

“I just think that you should give some thought to settling down, sweetheart.”

Five times now her mom has made some heavy-handed hint at marriage. It looks like Nic is winning that ten bucks after all.  

Alex gives her the same answer: it’s way too soon to tell (which is the truth) and not that interested in the whole idea (also the truth). The intern snickers quietly beside her, having figured out what the conversation is about.  

Alex could give her mom another reason, that Strand’s wife isn’t really dead, and if she did marry him, they’d have to pack up and move to some compound in Utah. And then there’s the millionaire businessman that secretly wants her to do his dirty work and if she doesn’t, he might kill her. But for the sake of keeping the conversation short, Alex keeps those to herself.

She thanks the universe every day that her mom has no interest in listening to the podcast, after deeming it ‘too spooky’ after episode three.  

“Well, okay, then,” Maggie sighs, the words rolling out of her mouth in that hybrid accent of hers, the southern Louisiana mixing with the Canadian shift of her many years spent up north. “But don’t forget: you promised me that you would bring him up so I can meet him in person. Before Christmas, if possible, because you know your brother as well as I do. He’ll spend most of it telling embarrassing stories. I’m as good as your dad was at sussing out your significant others, but it’s easier if I don’t have to listen that pool party story for the fortieth time.”  

The thought of bringing Strand up to meet her mom is a daunting one. No one is better at politely prying information out of people than Maggie Reagan. He would be a great challenge; the man is practically a house full of locked doors when it comes to talking about his past. But Alex is selfish enough to admit to herself that she wants to be the one with the skeleton key to unlock them all.  

So, she swiftly changes the subject.  

“Oh, Mom, I’m almost back at the studio and I have to ask you something.” At the acknowledging hum on the other end, she continues, “I’m doing an episode on adoption for another show and it kind of... spurred my own personal interest. I was wondering if you had any documents or anything from that agency back in Halifax.”

“Well, I’ve got all of the paperwork from when we fostered you and when the adoption was finalized. Is that what you need?”   

“That would be great, too, but I’m trying to find stuff from before I went into the system,” Alex tells her.  

“I don’t think we have any of that, but the agency might have it if they’re still around. They never gave us your intake forms, just told us what happened, same as we told you. But I’ve got their number written down somewhere in all that paperwork. It’ll take me a little while to find it.”

“That’s fine, no rush,” Alex lies, not wanting to give her a reason to stress over why she needs it quickly.  

Maggie makes hushed noises on the other end, calling out to Sloopy and Bethy-Reed to stop their meowing at the back door. Through the phone, Alex can hear their meows increase tenfold when the kitchen chair her mom must be sitting in moves back, the legs scraping at the tiles.

“Yes, oh I know! I know you want outside, you two loudmouths. The Mayfield’s can probably hear that you want outside,” Maggie talks animatedly to the cats, before the back door whines across the line. “Okay, well, sweetheart, I’ll let you get back to work. I’ll email it all over to you once I can get into that spare bedroom.”

“You mean the junk room.”

Maggie lets out a wistful sigh. “I like to call it the in-progress room.”

Alex snorts at the description, to which her mom playfully reprimands her for. They’ve moved on to gossiping about the local marina’s new owners when Alex reaches her office.

Sitting behind her computer with her boots propped up on a filing cabinet is Amalia, who swivels towards the door and grins at Alex (who really does need to have a talk with the front desk about sending people back here unannounced).

Alex quickly ends the phone call with her mom  

“It’s been less than forty-eight hours since I called you. How are you here...” she trails off to glance at her computer screen, “sitting behind my desk and watching a Vine compilation?”

“This video is blocked in my country,” Amalia explains, as if that’s in any way an explanation. “And I had a short layover in Frankfurt, so I just got in this morning.”  

“Only you could spend twenty hours on an airplane and still look like you just walked off the runway,” Alex grumbles as she leans down to hug her friend.  

“It’s good to see you, too,” Amalia says, tacking on a few Russian words at the end of the sentence that sound like ‘my friend’ to Alex’s untrained ear, but honestly could be anything, knowing her.  

Shoving a pile of folders to the other side, Alex hops up to sit on the desk, trying not to swing her legs from the curiosity coursing through her. “So, did you manage to find anything?”  

Before Amalia can respond, there’s a knock at the door. It opens without permission and they both turn to see Nic leaning against the doorframe, one hand loosely tucked into his pocket as he tries to look casual. The two women share a glance.  

“I thought I heard that thick accent of yours,” Nic says, that wide, elated grin of his firmly in place. “What the hell are you doing back in Seattle, Chenkova?”  

“A favor,” Amalia answers, keeping it short and sweet.  

Alex tips her head to the doorway. “It’s fine, he knows.”

“Oh. In that case, I’m here to look into Alexandra’s past, to find out her superhero origin story.”

Alex rolls her eyes. “I’m not a superhero.”

“Don’t mark down yourself. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing you in spandex.” Amalia smirks as a blush works its way across Alex’s cheeks.  

Nic clears his throat from the doorway, that dumb grin flashing again. “You ladies want to grab some lunch? We can play catch-up, see what our Russian spy has been up to.”

Picking up her coffee, Alex starts to shake her head when Amalia puts a hand on her thigh and tilts her head, an unspoken request for her to join (and save her from Nic’s bumbling attempts at flirtation).  

“Fine.” Amalia stands up, curling an arm around Alex’s shoulders as she leads her out, grabbing her suitcase as she goes. “But you are paying, seeing as you still owe me those two-hundred francs.”    

 

\------

 

Lunch runs over into dinner as they sit in a café near the studio, listening to Amalia recount stories of her time in Moscow and other unnamed locations around Europe. Nic hangs on her every word, his chin cupped in his hands, playing the lovesick, oblivious fool. Alex feels a little sorry for him, and his inability to realize that Amalia – despite her flirtatious personality – is very much in love with her girlfriend.  

But Nic does manage to keep his poor attempts at flirting to himself (and pays for the tab), and Alex has to admit that it’s nice, the three of them hanging out again. If it weren’t for the heartburn and the achy pain of carpal tunnel in her wrists that remind her of her age, she could imagine that it’s another break between classes at UW.  

They split off before traffic gets too bad, and Amalia tags along to her house so they can continue their conversation from earlier. This time, though, it’s with a bottle of Spätburgunder that Amalia bought at the airport that they share, slumped back on the sofa, the television on low for background noise. Having ditched her boots the moment they walked in the door, Amalia runs the heel of her foot over Relay, who lays sprawled in a puddle of dark fur, as if he partook in the wine, too.  

Alex picks up her phone as it trills, notifying her of a text from Strand – letting her know that he’s scheduling a phone interview with a professor tomorrow, and also to check up on how their afternoon is going. Watching Alex text back with that dopey expression of hers, Amalia takes a break from talking shop.   

“This is usually when I’d try to put the moves on you, but you are clearly a taken woman.”  

Alex scrunches her nose at the label. “You make me sound like some Victorian housewife. We haven’t even said... you know... to each other.”

“Alexandra Reagan afraid to use her words. I thought I would never see the day.” Amalia chuckles, her head lolling against the back of the cushion. “Society makes them seem like such a big deal. It’s not. Look: I love you. There, it’s not that difficult. There shouldn’t be so many threads attached to telling people you love them.”

“Well, yeah – I love you, too. It’s just... not the same.”  

“You do love him, though, yes?”  

Her gaze lands anywhere but Amalia’s face. “I think so. I guess. I... yeah.”

“Then you tell him that. It doesn’t have to be a big moment, no grand gesture. It will feel as natural saying it, as you do feeling it. You know these things. You told me all about your past relationships, about Hiker Girl and Museum Lady and Restaurant Guy and how they broke your heart.”

“If I recall, you’re also on my list of heartbreakers.”

Amalia smirks at that, not even trying to hide it behind her glass. “It is a privilege to be on your list, Alexandra.”  

“I thought you came here to tell me about what info you dug up for me.” She gets a scoff for her poor attempt to change the conversation, but she does receive a manila envelope that Amalia whacks onto her lap. Abandoning her wine glass, Alex picks it up to leaf through it. “Wow, this is... a lot.”

“I was motivated to help my good friend.” Alex glances up at her to smile appreciatively before sticking her nose back into the papers. “My good friend that I flew five-thousand miles to see in person.”  

Hint taken, Alex drops the folder onto the coffee table, then makes a show of nudging it away with her foot.

“I’ll buy us dinner from that Tibetan place you like if you tell me about that scandal at the embassy in Paris, the one you threatened Nic about last week if he bothered you about it again.”  

Amalia makes a show of considering it, a familiar glint in her eyes. “You get me some chili momos and it’s a deal.”  

Having spent fourteen hours in the air, it appears that half a bottle of wine and a few bites of an appetizer are enough to put Amalia down for the count. She curls around one of the throw pillows, mumbles about resting her eyes, and is dead to the world in a matter of minutes. Alex grabs a blanket off the armchair and covers her, before settling down next to her to peruse the folder. It’s been calling her name for the past hour while they chatted and waited for the food to be delivered.  

Most of the documents are items her mom sent over earlier: their foster application for her, the finalized adoption papers, the certificate of her name change, the application for her new social insurance number card. Included among them is miscellaneous paperwork with no real point (other than Amalia showing off): Alex’s transcripts from elementary school, a copy of a paper she wrote in high school, a detention slip from third grade when she pushed Jesse Alexander down and kicked him in the head, after he tried to kiss her best friend Tori.  

She pauses at the next document. It’s an intake form she’s never seen before, dated October 29, 1983. There’s a statement from a Lieutenant O’Callaghan, though the text is faded and difficult to read, having been written in print. What she can make out is a street address at the bottom of the page. Scrambling for her phone, she types it in. A fire station in Tuwiuwok, Nova Scotia pulls up on the map, eighty miles north of Halifax.  

Her parents hadn’t dropped her off at the agency, or even a hospital. They’d left her on the front stoop of a fire station and walked away. They hadn’t even bothered to write down her full name.

She bites at her lower lip when she feels it start to tremble. Dropping the paperwork, she curls a hand around her mouth, determined not to wake Amalia. Warmth brushes against her leg as Relay sits up and drops his head onto her knee.  

“Come here, buddy,” she whispers, patting the empty cushion in front of her. “Come on up here.”  

He hops up and scrambles into her lap, licking at her cheek before she can get an arm around him. Ruffling his fur, she ducks her head to rest it against him, chuckling when his wet nose pushes against her neck.

A hand clasps over hers. She opens her eyes to see Amalia watching her, concern pulling at the corners of her lips.  

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, her accent thicker with sleep.  

Alex turns her hand over so she can link their fingers together.  

“It’s okay.”

 

\------

 

The next morning, Doctor Jane Martindale, a professor of archaeology and art history at McGill University in Montreal, agrees to a video chat interview. The only caveat being that they conduct it at noon during her lunch break, since the university’s wifi is much better than her own.  

Strand meets Alex at the studio early in order to have time to discuss Amalia’s findings before the interview at nine.   

“That’s... odd,” he comments as he reads over the intake form.  

“What’s odd?”

“The town where you were found. It’s...” he trails off to type something into his phone, nodding when he gets confirmation. “Tuwiuwok, it’s a Mi'kmaq word. The Mi'kmaq are a First Nations people, most originating in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, though they also settled in Quebec and the upper northeast of the U.S.”  

At her look of impatience, Strand catches himself. “Right. Tuwiuwok, it means ‘haven for God’s orphans.’”

“That’s a little on the nose.” Alex tries for a laugh as she tucks her arms around her waist. “So, what, my parents left me in some town because it translated to a great place to drop off unwanted kids?”  

“I doubt they knew the meaning behind the word,” he reasons, his tone gone soft.   

“You did.”

“Yes, but I wrote a paper on the religious beliefs of the Mi’kmaq people for undergrad.”

“Oh.” She lets her arms drop so she can fidget with the coffee cup in front of her, before crossing her arms back over her chest. “Well, I know you’re not one for coincidences–”

“Where did you find this?” Strand interrupts, tugging a paper out of the stack and flipping it around so she can see it. It looks like a page of Egyptian hieroglyphs to her untrained eye, though why it would be in between her adoption papers is confusing.

Alex lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Maybe Amalia included it on accident – it could be something else she’s working on. I can text her and see.”

“This is an ancient Sumerian document. It looks almost.... Would you mind if I asked Doctor Martindale about it? She might be able to translate some of what it says.”  

There’s something in his expression that makes Alex think that this isn’t just another wall of text about a lost city of gold or a wish-fulfilling stone. So, without considering how much getting her ass kicked by Amalia will hurt when she finds out she agreed to let Strand consult an outsider about it, she gives her consent.  

Which is good, because a minute later her computer starts trilling with a video call request from Martindale. The doctor is dressed in a burgundy sweatshirt that’s stitched with scarecrows and pumpkins, her gray hair pulled into a fishtail braid that shows off the chunky earrings and necklace she wears.  

 _She looks like if a craft store were a person_ , Alex thinks to herself, trying to keep the thought from her expression.  

“Is it okay with you two if I just dive right in?” Martindale asks, once they’ve started the recording and gone through the introductions.  

“Actually,” Strand interrupts, “I came across something this morning that I wanted you to take a quick look at, if you’d be amenable.”  

“Oh, aren’t you beautiful?” she murmurs when the attachment loads. “Where did you find this?”

“It was... among some other research materials,” Alex says, glancing at Strand.  

“I assume you would like me to translate?”

“Yes,” they answer in unison, causing her to giggle at the two.

“All right, all right, let’s see here.” Her face drops away from the screen as she shares her desktop view, allowing them to follow along with the cursor as she reads. “What we have here looks like a poem of sorts. Maybe a song, but I wouldn’t go that far. It reads: ‘The night will be forever, when the last of the line, the dark one surrounded by the many, rises from sleep to devour the world.’”

“Wow, that’s...”

“Pretty dark stuff, yeah?” she finishes for Alex, who mutters her agreement.

“And after that?” Strand asks. “The writing at the bottom looks different to me.”

There’s a jingling sound on the other end, which is explained when Martindale switches the screen back to her face as she nods, her earrings swinging as she does.  

“You’re precisely right. Those are numbers – too many for me to list here, but I can translate them and send them over in an email, if you like.”

The document translated, Alex takes the reigns from Strand so she can ask Martindale about the items they found in his father’s journal. They spend the next few minutes discussing the Enûma Eliš, the Babylonian creation myth that was recovered in 1849. Strand specifically requests that Martindale look at the page he sent her, on which his father had scribbled a side note about the lost treasures of Babylon. Below that, two words are written and underlined:  _bêlu papparmīnu!!_

“I believe _bêlu_ referred to a type of government.” Martindale gestures with her hands as she tries to explain. “But more so the verb, as in ‘to govern,’ or the act of ruling itself. I will have to get back to you on the second word, though I can recall coming across it before. It may have to do with... nature, perhaps.”  

“There’s a note here at the bottom of the page, of–” he’s cut off when Martindale scoffs.  

“George Duris. Of course. You can’t research historic treasures without his name popping up.” She rolls her eyes. “He was something of a... collector, back in his time.”

“And what time was that?”

“Around the mid-1800s, when selfish and entitled men were starting to call themselves ‘citizens of the world,’” Martindale says with several degrees of exasperation as she puts air quotes around the term. “But yes, this note seems to suggest that whatever this object was, Duris might have been the one to take it. And knowing that man, it’s probably buried somewhere, hidden away for the next millennia.”  

They end the interview there, with Martindale promising to send over the number translation as soon as her lecture is over. Strand prepares to take off to make it to his mid-morning class, though not before giving Alex a tentative kiss goodbye that has her joking that they’ve still got the relatively-soundproof booth booked for the rest of the hour. It prompts that nervous chuckle out of him, the one where he’s not entirely sure if she’s joking or not, and he tosses his leather messenger bag on with a promise to text her when he’s done.  

Alex stands to follow him out when her phone lights up with Amalia’s face. Strand starts to open the door when she shoots a hand out, catching the strap of his bag and tugging.  

“Yeah, I’m not sure how either. It was just in there with some of the papers,” Alex says into the phone. “No, I don’t remember seeing it last night.... Definitely strange, yeah, but we'll figure it out. Mmm-hmm, yeah. You, too.”  

“Let me guess,” Strand grumbles when she hangs up, “she has no idea where the document came from.”

“No,” Alex shakes her head as she taps away at her phone. “And she’s not been working on anything similar. Her current investigation is on the Ukranian-Russian border conflict.” Meeting his gaze, she holds the phone up, the sudden ringing loud in the booth. “But I do have one other idea.”

His frown deepens when he reads the name on the screen. “No, absolutely n–”  

Alex silences him with a finger to her lips as the call connects.  

“Good morning, Alex,” Simon greets, his voice a little choppy from a poor connection.  

“Hello, Simon,” she replies in the same cool tone. “I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“Probably.”  

“I found a strange paper with some personal documents of mine. Would you happen to know how it got there?”  

“‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’” Strand rolls his eyes at Simon’s attempt at being aloof. “He and I know the many things, and you know the one big thing. I thought you knew many things, but now I’m... not sure if you do.”

“You can cut the bullshit.” Alex makes no attempt to hide the frustration that laces her tone. “I know you’re working with Thomas Warren.”

At that, Simon chuckles, the distortion across the connection making it sound tinny.  

“To answer your question, Alex, I need to admit the truth. The world behind the world is coming. There’s skin upon it, you see – a skin upon the world that regular people can’t see through. And in order to see what’s going to happen, in order to lift the veil and really see things clearly, I had to retrieve that paper for you. I was going to send you, but plans... changed.”

“Why? What’s so special about it?”

“It’s to help you understand the things you don’t understand.”

“What do I not understand, Simon?” He doesn’t respond to that, so she tries a different tactic. “Okay, can you tell me where you found the paper?”

“Turkey. More specifically, the city of Pamukkale. Some believe it’s the location of the gates to hell.”   

“But what's on this paper? A poem?”

Simon hums. “Some would say that. But it’s not. It’s a song.”

“I had someone translate it for me, and unless it’s the lyrics to a black metal song, I don’t know what it means.”

“It’s the Horn of Tiamat,” he admits without any of his usual flair. Alex meets Strand’s skeptical gaze. “A mistranslation lead people to believe they were looking for a musical instrument. But I knew that for things to unfold properly, you needed to see it. I’m sorry I had to go inside your house again, but I couldn’t deliver it any other way – he can access any device, so it had to be in person.” There’s a brief pause before he adds, “And I like your dog. I wanted to pet him again.”

Alex allows a silence to drift between them, biting at her lip as she contemplates his claims.

“How am I supposed to trust you on this? That the paper I’m holding is this ancient scripture people have been searching hundreds of years for and you just... you handed it off to me.”

“You can’t trust anything I say.”  

Reflexively, her hand tightens around the phone, wanting him to stop with the pseudo-cryptic nonsense. “But,” Simon continues, “you also don’t have any other choice but to believe me. Nevertheless, I’m telling the truth. You know I am.”

“I have another question.” At the answering silence on the other end, she continues, “I want to know how you have your sigil. I spoke with another person who can bilocate, and he said that you aren’t allowed to copy other sigils. But I’ve seen yours in the cabin we found Sebastian Torres in, and on the back of a demon board, and–”

“He gave it to me.”

“Who did? Warren?”  

Simon laughs, raspy in the quiet of the booth. On the other end, there’s the distinct noise of a car horn, followed by an angry voice shouting in Spanish.  

“All in due time. Don’t worry, Alex, we’ll speak again, and the things that need to be known will be, and the things that don’t need to be known won’t be. Oh, and I forgot – good morning, Doctor Strand.”  

With that, Simon hangs up. The phone beeps twice in her hand, signaling the end of the call.  

“I feel like I don’t know much of anything anymore,” she mutters as she tucks the phone away.

It’s difficult to grasp that it’s this easy, that she has a copy of the Horn of Tiamat in her possession. If Simon is to be believed, of course. And then there’s the issue with Warren, and how he claimed the document was nothing more than a red herring to further pique her curiosity. But now the question is: if the copy she’s holding is a fake (though, judging by Martindale’s reaction, it’s a very convincing fake), is Simon in on the trick? Or has he been fooled, too?  

Alex suddenly has the mental image of him strolling into a Kinko's in Key West, dressed in board shorts and a tie-dye shirt, with a primordial goddess’s ancient prophecy on a thumb drive, playing the role of the double agent.      

Strand reaches out, his hand skimming up her arm until he can grasp her shoulder.  

“We’ll figure this out,” he promises and she nods in agreement, her eyes on the floor between them, and he knows it’s more to placate him than anything, that she’s not really listening. Moving from her shoulder, his hand drifts along the side of her neck, feeling how rigid it is as his fingers find a home in the hair behind her ear. He tips his head down, urging her to look at him. “We have enough information to help us connect the dots. It’ll just take some time.”  

Alex sighs as he sweeps his thumb across her cheek, ignoring the soft smile on his face as she leans in to the touch, a cat moving into the warmth of the sun.  

“We’ll figure this out,” he repeats. “Do you believe me?”

She nods.

Tipping his head down to brush a kiss against her forehead, he keeps her close for another long moment. “Good.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm convinced that no one at PNWS actually gets anything done, given that two of their hosts always seem to be getting food or coffee in my story. 
> 
>  
> 
> Terms / allusions:
> 
> Sloopy and Bethy-Reed are more song-inspired cat names, because I couldn't resist. Brownie points to you (are those still a thing? I feel like I'm back on ff.net in 2005) if you know the songs. 
> 
> The fictional town of Tuwiuwok meaning ‘haven for God’s orphans' is an idea I completely stole from Syfy's _Haven_ , but that's as far as the connection goes. A crossover fic this is not. 
> 
> "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." - Archilochus 
> 
> The mention of Simon being a double agent is a little nod to The Cluttered Desk Podcast, of which I listened to all of their TBTP reviews and very much enjoyed their picture of Simon as someone who believes he's in an action movie.


	7. Chapter 7

“George Duris was called many things: a pillager, a criminal, a thief. The only time he was referred to as a ‘citizen of the world’ was when he was talking about himself,” Andrew Virk says with a grin.  

An adjunct professor of religion at Fordham University, Virk has a special interest in American mysticism and spiritualism. He begins the interview apologizing for his surroundings (the back booth at a coffee shop on campus), but that the office they loaned him is a shared one, and his colleague is having office hours. The lop-sided bowtie and coffee-stained button-down only add to his disheveled appearance. What he lacks in presentation he makes up for in enthusiasm, though, as he gestures wildly with his hands, mapping out Duris’s timeline using sugar packets and three empty coffee mugs.    

“To his credit, though,” Virk continues, “he did extensive traveling for a man of his time. He was born in Switzerland, then moved to Armenia at age four, where he flunked out of upper secondary school. He didn’t seem to care much, since he made enough money from gambling to travel to Greece, where he spent most of his twenties.”

“Is this where the... pillaging comes in to play?”  

Virk nods, his bowtie dislodging a little more as he does.  

“Right, right – so he has a mentor there that shows him the ropes, how to sell an artifact, etcetera. He makes frequent trips to other countries – to Italy and Austria, then up into Russia, down to Bulgaria, then farther down into Turkey. During his last trip, he went back over to Italy and, according to his partner’s account, Duris traded two-hundred pounds of tobacco and a lapis lazuli stone for a precious Mesopotamian agate stone that – again, according to this partner – had mystical powers.”  

“Well, did it?”  

Virk chuckles at her question. “No, unfortunately not. Duris didn’t develop the ability to see into the future or anything like that. Whatever the stone was, though, it made him anxious and effected his sleep and day-to-day life so severely that he believed it to be cursed. Eventually, it’s believed that he sent it off to a museum to be cataloged.”  

“What a charitable contribution.”  

“Right – well, soon after that trip to Italy, he packed his things and moved to America. This would’ve been around 1875. It was the new home of mysticism, after all. He hoped it would be a place where people would support this idea that he conceived while spending time with monks in Russia and Italy.”

“What was his idea?” Alex asks.

“He believed that we all exist in what he called ‘the shroud.’ That there’s a fabric that hides a true reality, and that this fabric separates our minds from it. To break through, one would have to take certain steps that he wrote about, through a... like a personal recipe of mysticism and science.”   

“So,” Alex’s nose scrunches up as she tries to recall the phrase Simon used, “he believed that there was a skin covering reality?”

“Oh, yes, exactly that!” The bowtie around Virk’s neck comes apart completely, hanging on either side of his collar like a small, maroon scarf. “He believed this fabric was quite literal – invisible, yet something we could break through by using a specific melody that would correspond to a particle in our bodies.”

“So, you play this song and it lets you experience this... other side? Is that why he traveled to America? Was there someone who also believed in this... musical note equaling to enlightenment?”  

“Not as dedicated to the idea as he was,” Virk says, “but he did find kinship with Charles Guiteau.”

“I feel like I’ve heard that name before.”

“Probably during an American history class, I’d bet – he was the man who assassinated President Garfield in 1881.” He pauses to take a sip of his coffee. Alex contemplates if someone should warn him about his overconsumption of caffeine. “You see, Guiteau was an outcast. He’d been involved with this religious communal society up in Oneida, New York on and off for several years. However, he had a son that Duris was very interested in studying.”

“Our citizen of the world was also a scientist?”  

“He considered himself one, yes,” Virk nods. “In his last journal, he remarks on how excited he is to meet with Daniel, Guiteau’s son. He even wrote ‘this is one of them’ beside Daniel’s name.”

“One of them? What does that mean?”

“He believed that there were people inherently born with this ability to see through to the other side. That they were special harmonic keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe, to tearing that fabric so we might all eventually see through it. Truthfully, Duris wanted everyone to have this ability.”  

“So, Duris was like Magneto in the first _X-Men_ movie. Instead of trying to make everyone mutants, he wanted to make everyone enlightened?”  

Virk’s eyebrows scrunch down at the comparison. “I’m afraid I’ve never seen the film.”  

Flapping her hand, Alex signals him to ignore the outdated reference and continue on.  

“But – anyway, yes, he wanted to make everyone aware of this obtrusive fabric. We know that he did meet with Daniel, although the journal he must’ve written his findings in has been lost to time. We do know that he and his wife Josephine left their apartment in East Bethany to travel south with Charles and Daniel, before Charles broke off to get involved with the political scene, leaving behind Daniel. Where they were planning on going, though, we don’t know. The last two entries in Duris’s journal were short, dated a day apart in June of 1881. The first was: ‘I have found them a place to rest.’ The second was even more troubling: ‘Number is the rulers of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons. And the demons have found me.’”

“Wow,” Alex says. “The first one sounds–”

“Like he may have killed his wife and Daniel?” Virk interrupts. “It certainly sounds like it. And though there’s no proof of anything like that happening, it is disconcerting that Josephine and Daniel seem to disappear after June of 1881.”

“What happened to Duris?”

“He was found a few months later in Litchfield, New Hampshire, just over the border from Massachusetts. He’d been beaten and hanged from a tree off a deserted road.”

“When you say a few months...”

Virk’s wince pinches at his face. “He was identified by the contents of his wallet, and by the denture records kept by his dentist back in New York.”  

“What do you think he meant by his last entry? That numbers are the cause of gods and demons?”  

Blowing out a breath, Virk folds his hands together on top of the table as his eyes focus on something off-screen. “Well, the first sentence is a quote from Pythagoras. As for the second, I think it must have something to do with whatever he discovered while examining Daniel. Like I said, those notes have never been found. In truth, we may never know the meaning behind his last words.”

 

\------

 

When Alex returns home, she’s greeted by the sight of Nic and Strand’s cars parked out front. The porchlight is already glowing, beckoning her inside. Where, as per usual, Relay bounds over to say hello and sniff at her shoes that she kicks off in the entryway.  

In the kitchen, Amalia, Nic, and Strand are swapping stories of their most miserable work trips. As the other two nurse glasses of wine, Strand stirs something on the stove.  

Drawn by the conversation and the smell of garlic, Alex takes the wine Amalia offers her and wanders over to the stove. Scattered about three pans are the ingredients for some sort of complicated pasta dish. She turns and presses a quick kiss against Strand’s shirt where it covers his upper arm. Tilting her head up, she catches his gaze, his eyes even bluer in the range hood’s wash of light. He leans down to let her capture his lips in a kiss.  

“Hi.”

“Hello,” he returns, settling a hand on the small of her back as she leans against him. Feeling the sigh that rolls out of her, he runs his hand along her spine in response, pleased when she moves closer, given how strange everything has been for the past week.  

“You know,” she grins, “I’d think that your worst trip would’ve been out to Idaho with me this past summer.”

“I believe that ended rather well, though.” That smug look of his is firmly in place.

“I mean the almost drowning in a canyon part.”  

He makes a show of thinking it over before shrugging, prompting another grin out of Alex.  

“You two are very cute,” Amalia comments from where Nic and she sit at the small island that separates the kitchen from the living room.  

“How much wine have you had?” Alex asks as she moves around the kitchen, filling Relay’s bowls and loading the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.  

“Not enough to impair my judgement.” Amalia pats the barstool next to her in invitation.  

Hopping up, Alex is immediately drawn to the laptop on the counter. The document onscreen is a collection of medical records from Lakeville Hospital in Lakeville, Massachusetts. Amalia motions to two patient entries dated January 19th, 1884: Josephine Archer, age 33 and Daniel Archer, age 13.  

The recorder is out of Alex’s pocket and on the counter in a matter of seconds.  

“But how do you know if these are the same people? Those first names aren’t uncommon for that time period.”

Amalia brings up a page from the _Chicago Tribune_ ’s archive, clearing her throat before reading, “‘Charles and Anna Clancy are happy to announce the birth of their daughter, Josephine Florence Clancy, born September 3rd, 1851.’”  

A quick click back over to the hospital records show the same date of birth listed for Josephine Archer. Alex goes to tap a nail against the stem of her wine glass before she remembers the recording, and gives in to chewing on her bottom lip instead.  

“Did she remarry?”  

Amalia shakes her head. “There’s no announcement or license that I could locate.”

“Then I’m not sure if... I mean, we can’t be completely sure these women are the same person.”

“Wait,” Nic interrupts from beside them, “Archer – as in Henry James’s _The Portrait of a Lady_? The novel where a young, independent woman is scorned by a treacherous husband with a hidden agenda?”

Alex frowns at the idea. “Seems a bit too on the nose.”  

“It was the nineteenth century,” he points out. “There was no time for subtlety, not when you’re at risk of dying from cholera. And this was before the creation of social security numbers, or any sort of photo IDs. Which would make it pretty easy for a woman on the run, since it’s clear her husband was being targeted for something.”

Alex looks over the record for Josephine Archer, who died just two months after admission from tuberculosis. Daniel’s story didn’t end there, though. Another record for him lists another stay at the same hospital, this time in April of 1901, and then a discharge form in November of the same year. Dated the next year is a marriage license from Plymouth County in Massachusetts for Daniel Archer and Patsy Johnson.       

“And do you want to know the city they lived in? Mattapoisett. Which–”  

“–which,” Nic cuts Amalia off, too excited to contain the connection, “in the local native people’s tongue means ‘a place to rest.’”  

Alex ignores the bickering that follows and crowds closer to better see the screen.  

“What about kids? Did they have any?”

Amalia lifts a finger at her to pause the waterfall of questions that she knows are coming, and sifts through the bookmarked files on her laptop.

“But why are you so interested in Daniel?” Strand asks as he drains a pot of noodles over the sink.  

“Duris believed that Daniel had this ability to see the other side. I’m thinking it’s possible that Daniel could bilocate.” Before Strand can interrupt her, Alex continues, “The last thing Duris wrote – the quote from Pythagoras, the note about the numbers being demons, I’m wondering if... well, Daniel was young, right? If he is able to bilocate, he’s going to draw a sigil, but his drawing skills aren’t really up to par. His circles aren’t going to be perfect. They might be lopsided.”

“Or look more like ovals,” Amalia finishes for her.

Alex nods. “Exactly. Tannis said that bilocating is often passed down genetically, so there might be someone out there from Daniel’s family line that has this ability, too.”

“I don’t know. This sounds more like Jumping to Conclusions: The Podcast,” Nic jokes. “What do you plan on doing if you find these people? Discuss the best way to bilocate into a bank vault?”

Ignoring him, Alex presses onward. “I’d assume like any other group with unexplained abilities, like psychics or mediums, they run in similar circles. I mean, we saw the inside of that tunnel in Olympia – there were at least fifty sigils painted on the walls. They have to communicate with each other somehow, even if it’s just regionally. And if Daniel’s descendants stayed around the area he grew up in Massachusetts, then maybe some of them are still in the area. Maybe they know someone that’s part of my biological family, since I was found in Nova Scotia.”

“I feel like there’s an easier way to go about this. Are you sure there isn’t a subreddit out there? BilocatorsAnonymous has a nice ring to it.”

Nic audibly closes his mouth when Amalia shoots him a sour look.    

“I am no expert on the geography of this continent, but I don’t think the northeast is as small as you think it is, Alexandra.” Directing the screen to face Alex, Amalia waves a hand at the image on the page. “But, if you were wondering, Daniel’s descendant is Autumn Chen. She started a blog back in 2013 tracing back her maternal family tree, in which she names Daniel Archer as her great-great grandfather.”    

Pulling out her phone, Alex types as she talks. “Does she have her email listed? I’ll see if she’s willing to talk to me. Maybe she can bilocate, too.”  

Amalia’s palm covers the screen of her phone, derailing Alex’s thought process as she looks up at her friend in confusion. “What?”

“I am afraid I have some bad news.” She motions to the screen, where the last blog update from October 2015 reads:  

_This is not the new post anyone was wanting, but it is with a heavy heart that I announce Autumn’s passing. I know many of you followed her for family tree project and continued to follow her through the other personal journeys she went on._

_I am leaving this blog up for as long as the platform remains. I hope that you come back every now and then to roll your eyes and have a good laugh, as I did every day knowing this woman._  

_Love,_

_Chloe and Sullivan_

At the bottom is a photo of the family: two women sitting side-by-side with a little girl straddling their thighs, her arms roped around their necks as they hold onto her waist, both of them planting a kiss against her head. One of the women wears a hospital gown and robe, her features bruised and sallow, a bright scarf tied around her head.  

Alex swallows back her excitement. “Oh. Well, what about siblings? Or other family members?”  

Amalia shakes her head. “It says she had a sister, but she died long ago. Both parents are dead, too. Grandparents and the one aunt have passed, as well.”

“Is there... did the wife, did she leave any contact information?”

“I’m not sure if you should be bothering this woman’s widow,” Strand warns.  

Alex bites at her lip, not willing to admit that she had the same thought, but too desperate for information to let it stop her. “I don’t want to bother her, but this is the only lead we’ve had.”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a lead to me. What do you expect her to tell you that this woman’s website can’t?”    

“I think I found something,” Amalia announces, but the words seem to fall on deaf ears as the two continue their argument.  

“Richard, despite what the news says, not everyone puts everything personal up on the internet.”

“Will you two–”

“You expect this woman to trust a complete stranger that emails her wanting to look at her dead wife’s things because they claim to travel through time. If the wife couldn’t bilocate, then how do you think the widow is going to react to an email like that? You’d sound like a crackpot.”

Amalia smacks a hand on the counter, silencing the bickering couple as they turn their wide eyes towards her.

“Thank you,” she purrs as she moves the laptop towards Alex again. “I found a post you might be interested in.”   

The post is on Autumn’s blog, where she writes about her mother’s suicide. Halfway down the page is an embedded photo of a newspaper article, dated October 13th, 1992. The headline reads: _Woman who drowned in Cobequid Bay identified._

Prepared to skim through the entire article on the recovery effort, Alex stops short on the opening line: _Colchester County officials have identified the woman pulled from the Tuwiuwok Bluff area of Cobequid Bay as Catherine Chen, 35._    

“I think that classifies as a decent enough connection for you to email her,” Nic declares.

Crossing the room and quickly scanning the page, Strand reaches out to squeeze Alex’s shoulder to catch her attention.  

“I agree.”  

 

\------

 

The muffled debate in the living room of what bar to go to ceases as the front door creaks shut, leaving the house to settle in the quiet of night. Weak moonlight drifts in around the closed blinds, creating a hazy, bluish-white tinge to the bedroom. The pull string hanging from the ceiling fan clinks softly against the light cover. It, combined with the comfort of having someone beside her, is usually enough to lull Alex into a decent sleep.  

Harsh light carves at the ceiling as she taps her phone screen, biting back the disappointment when there’s no little red number beside the mail app.  

“You have your notifications turned on,” Strand reminds her in that sleep-roughened tone. Underneath her sleep shirt, his hand runs up and down her bare back. The bed dips as he shifts to move closer, sliding one leg in between hers. The room darkens once more as the phone screen fades to black.  

“I know.”  

“And it’s nearly midnight in Chicago; she's probably sleeping.”

“I know,” Alex repeats, tacking on a sigh at the end for good measure. She brings her arm back under the covers, humming with contentment as Strand drops a kiss to her shoulder.  

Bright light illuminates the room again as the phone trills once with an email notification. Scrambling to pull it from the charger, Alex opens the app and reads. The positive reply is evident by her expression, which Strand reads as barely-contained excitement.  

“She said yes. She says there’s a box of everything Autumn collected, and it has more of the personal documents she didn’t want to put online, and that she’d be more than happy to share it. And she’s... yeah, she’s free tomorrow after her daughter’s swim lessons at eleven a.m.”  

“When’s the next flight to Chicago?”

There’s a flurry of taps against the screen and then: “American has a flight that leaves at seven.”  

“Then book us two tickets so we can get some sleep before our flight in the morning.” He watches relief wash through her features as she meets his gaze over her phone, surprised that she thought he’d leave her to investigate such a vital clue by herself (in another city halfway across the country, where he’d be helpless to prevent anything happening to her).  

She taps again for another few minutes, before twisting to plug it back in and returning to burrow into the blanket’s warmth.

“Done.” Snuggling closer, she tucks herself up against him.

“Good,” he hums, dropping a kiss to the crown of her head. “Now, sleep.”

And so, she does.   

 

\------

 

Pain itches across her scalp. Alex blinks awake. The bedroom is still dark, the moon casting slivers of light that stripe the far wall. She reaches up to smooth the hurt away, readjusting in the sheets to settle in for sleep once more.  

Near the crown of her head, a chunk of hair is tugged once, then twice. Her eyelids flutter back open to read the clock on the bedside table. The red numbers read 3:35 a.m.  

“It’s not time to get up yet,” she mumbles.

Strand yanks again.

Grumbling a request for him to stop being an ass, she throws her hand back to smack him. Her pulse increases when it meets the hard plane of his back. She rolls, bouncing the mattress as she sits up and peers over Strand’s shoulder to see him sleeping peacefully, his lips parted slightly as he draws in slow, even breaths.  

She freezes. Her limbs quake slightly from how hard she tries to keep still.  

Another chunk of hair is tugged once, then again. And again, like a child tugging on their parent’s clothes for attention. Keeping one hand on Strand’s waist in case she needs to wake him, Alex slowly turns her head, her eyes tracking the mound of her legs under the sheets, the rumpled mess of the blankets, the edge of the mattress.  

Nothing.  

Sucking in a breath, she shifts to see over the edge, where the light from outside can’t reach. She’s desperate with how much she wants her vision to adjust so she can see into the patch of darkness. When it does, at least enough for her to make out the lines of her nightstand, it’s the same result: nothing.  

It’s tempting to go back, to snuggle up against Strand and fall back into a fitful sleep, to convince herself that she’s still dreaming. But there’s something at the back of her mind that keeps her waiting, watching the dark floor.  

A hand, then two hands, crawl out from under the bedframe and up the side. Alex scrambles back, knocking into Strand, who snuffles in his sleep, muttering her name. She can’t bring herself to respond, to reassure him – because the fingers are slipping over the edge, now, digging into the bed, finding purchase there to continue forward. They’re long, she realizes, too long because they’re each made of separate fingers, all stitched together with black wire, bloated with decay. The mottled skin is a greenish-black, yellowed in patches that look fuzzy with mold, the long, wiry arms they’re attached to colored the same. The smell of sweet, rotten fruit and wet iron hits her in a thick wave as she watches the hands crawl towards her, leaving behind a shiny, wet trail across the sheets.

They come to a stop just before they reach her. One of the fingers drags itself back and forth across the bedding, scraping at the linen with its splintered nail. The other hand starts to head around her, towards Strand.  

She knocks it back, sending it skidding across the bed. Her heart thunders against her ribcage as she tries to keep her breathing steady, pressed against Strand’s body to keep the hands from him.  

Anger flares to life inside her chest. She’s sick and tired of her house being used as a playground for these things, watching her from the shadows, preying on her dreams – she worked hard to find this place, with its close proximity to work and its original hardwood floors and decent yard. She’s not letting them push her out of her own home. It’s her house, damn it, not theirs.

“Go away,” she orders.  

The hands slide back over the side of the bed. Straining her ears, she tries to determine what they’re doing.  

The room is too quiet.  

Then: a knock. Then twice, loud enough to rattle the headboard.  

Alex whirls, her gaze darting back and forth across the wall. Relay growls from his bed on the floor. Following the knocks as they move up along the wall and onto the ceiling, she trembles as they grow louder.  

Strand mutters something, fully waking up at the noise. She shushes him, looking back to catch his confused glare that flashes to abject horror.

Fingers dig into her scalp and yank. She cries out as she tumbles backwards across the bed and onto the floor, her temple grazing the nightstand’s corner as she falls.  

Strand shouts her name, crawling after her.  

Fear drives through her as two dark arms wrap around her waist and start to drag her under the bed. Alex squirms and kicks, throwing herself out of its grasp. Rolling across the floor, she reaches up onto the nightstand and grabs the marker there, scrambling back on her hands until she hits the wall. She scribbles a messy sigil onto the floor, encircling it once, thinking of the furthest depths, the darkest dark where she wants this thing to go and never return.  

“Come on!” she yells, watching the shadows under the bed. Waiting.

There’s a beat of silence, and then she hears it: the fingernails scratching against the wood, tearing to get to her. They dart out from the dark, scraping at the floor, the haggard arms stretching, racing to grab at her ankles. Strand shouts at her from above the bed, moving to come for her, but she raises a hand to stop him, keeping it raised until the hands come close enough.

She slams them down against the sigil.  

The circle glows for a moment – a pale, light white – and then the rest of the thing is dragged out from under the bed: a long, skeletal shadow, distorted and unformed. It screeches as the door closes around it, the snap and crunch of sinew filling the room before the door closes.  

The sudden quiet is quickly filled with their harsh breathing and Relay’s intermittent growls. Alex reaches for him, coaxes him into her arms to quiet him down.  

“Alex, what on earth–” Strand swallows back the rest of his sentence as he moves to crouch in front of her. He pulls her close, eyes wild with terror and worry and bewilderment and a thousand other emotions she can’t give a name to.

“We’re okay,” she assures him, wrapping an arm around him, anchoring him to her. “It’s gone.”  

There’s no way she could possibly know that, but she does – and if it does come back, she’ll do it again, every day for the rest of her life so it doesn’t touch what’s hers.  

She waits for Strand to explain it away. To wave his magic wand and make all of this disappear, make it all become the effects of Malbec on brain chemistry, or those three French words he kept spouting on the drive back from Olympia.  

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything, not at first, as he curls her against him. He glances back to where the sigil was, as if expecting it to return, then turns back to face her and shakes his head.  

“What was... where did you send it?”

She inhales, holding it for several seconds before she exhales. Then she answers, her voice steady once more.

“Away.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lakeville Hospital is a real sanatorium (abandoned now) in MA, though it opened in 1910 and not 1880. _But_ , Mattapoisett really does mean 'a place to rest' in the Wampanoag language. So it all evens out in the end. 
> 
>  
> 
> Terms / allusions:
> 
> The mention of the three French words is folie à deux, or "shared psychosis." It's also a little fun reference of my own to coffeesuperhero's [folie à deux](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7744567/chapters/17656561) (which, if you somehow haven't read it, ((which I highly doubt)) please go do so immediately).


	8. Chapter 8

 

Chloe Donahue lives in a shotgun house in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago.  

It’s a three-minute walk to the blue line, she tells them as she leads them through the house to the kitchen at the back. She’s a short woman, almost as short as Alex, with curly black hair that’s pulled back in a messy bun.

The little girl from the photo is sitting at the kitchen table, singing quietly to herself as she kicks her legs, her heels making rhythmic thumps against the wood. Her hair is damp at the ends from her morning swim. In front of her is a large sheet of construction paper that she’s coloring with three separate shades of blue tucked in between her small fingers, sweeping them back and forth against the bottom of the sheet.  

“Liv, this is Alex and Richard,” Chloe says, motioning to the two of them. “They flew out from Seattle to come talk with me about some important things. Would you like to say hello?”

“Hello,” Liv says, glancing briefly up at them before she goes back to her landscape.  

Strand steps farther into the room to compliment her on the drawing, commenting on the different layers of blue that make up the ocean in the foreground. She’s quick to remind him that it’s a lake, not an ocean.  

“Ah, you’re right,” Strand says, flashing a grin.  

Alex watches the two of them chat as Chloe moves around the kitchen, preparing a snack for her daughter and a pot of coffee for them.  

It’s still a surprise when their investigations involve a kid that Strand seems to know exactly what to do. She shouldn’t be surprised, though; Strand raised a daughter on his own for six years – after Charlie’s biological mother handed her off when she was four months old and returned to Brazil, wanting nothing to do with either of them. There’s something about seeing the put-together, stiff-shouldered academic squat down to fill in the orange sun or accept the offered juice box that feels like some sort of cosmic paradox.

She doesn’t have to wonder if he thinks of Charlie during these moments. It’s plainly there on his face, in the lines around his eyes that seem to deepen every time.  

They leave Liv to her coloring and return to the front of the house, to the living room with a bay window that looks out over the street. Being a Saturday afternoon, the sidewalks are busy with teenagers and couples and dog-walkers, all crossing back and forth underneath the window. Their muffled chatter mixes with the passing hum of cars.  

Chloe sets up the coffee tray as they take a seat on the sofa. A gray cat blinks at them from its comfortable position on the cushy arm.  On the coffee table is a cardboard box, _Personal_ written across in thick marker. The flaps are spread open, letting Alex view the top layer: a stack of documents and a leather-bound photo album.  

“This is everything she could find on the Archer family.” Chloe takes out the items and separates them on the table. “The documents, well at least a lot of them, are land deeds. It’s pretty boring stuff. But her mom’s things, that’s where it all starts to get a little bizarre.”

“How bizarre?”  

“Diagnosed and sent to a mental hospital kind of bizarre. Back when Autumn was seven, her mom went off the deep end. She started talking about how she was a murderer and that someone was telling her to go north and go swimming, to go look for her – Autumn’s older sister, the one who died before she was born.”

“How did the older sister die?”  

“According to Catherine – that was her mom – according to her journal, she drowned in the ocean while playing in the water. Except...” Chloe trails off, flipping through a cheap spiral-bound notebook. “Yeah, here. ‘I let it happen. I let her go because I knew what was going to come of her if she stayed. Though it wasn’t her fault, she’d already taken John, and I knew the curse would continue.’”  

“John?” Strand asks as Alex takes the journal to look over.  

“Oh, sorry – Autumn's dad. He died before she was born, too, in a work accident. Crushed by some steel beams that were being lifted.”  

Alex flips back, stopping at one of the first pages and reads:

_John found the record. I don’t know how. I thought if I hid it behind the bookcase that he’d never see it, but he must’ve been cleaning and he found it and played it. He told me when I came home from work, laughed and said my family has bad taste in music or something._

_I yelled at him to never touch my family’s things again, that he doesn’t know anything about them. He doesn’t understand how long they’ve been sending letters and records and stopping by after she was born and asking me to play it._  

_It’s a curse. He doesn’t understand what he’s done._

Then another, just three days later:

 _I have lost my husband and my daughter. I will not lose the other. I have to fix this._  

Alex glances up from the journal, dread clinging to her words as she asks, “She killed her own daughter?”  

“That’s certainly what it looks like.” Chloe pulls a document from the stack and hands it off to Strand. “She packed up and moved to Indianapolis, started going by Sarah Smith, and had Autumn. It wasn’t until she went off her meds in the late eighties and wound up in jail that they found out her real name. She’d been a person of interest in her first daughter’s disappearance. Autumn ended up with her grandparents on her dad’s side, and lived with them in San Diego. Catherine was transferred to Central State Hospital, where she was released in 1992.”

“And somehow ended up in Canada?”  

Chloe nods. “She took a bus to Toronto, then stole a car and drove over to some town a few hours north of Halifax.”

“Tuwiuwok,” Alex specifies.  

“Right, yeah.” Chloe glances down at the single piece of paper in her hand, the edges torn and stained with dirt. Her eyes skim it for a moment before she glances up, holding her gaze with Alex. “This was found inside the car in a Ziploc bag. It, um, it was used by the police as evidence of it being a suicide... since she had the forethought to seal the note from the water.”

Something catches Alex’s heart and holds it still for what feels like several long seconds at the first line.  

Clearing her throat, she reads to the room, “‘Alex loved the water, so I’m going to go to her. I’m going to swim to where the sky meets the ocean to find her, to tell her I’m sorry for what I did. Please tell Autumn that I’m sorry, but that she is free of this curse.’”

Strand wraps his hand around hers and she realizes that she’s shaking, her fingers clenched so tightly around the paper. She drops it to the table, where the messy scrawl stares back at her – a woman’s last words to her family.  

Chloe sucks in a breath, glancing between the two. “Your email said that you found something on Autumn’s website that might be in your personal interest. But I didn’t know. I didn’t make the connection until...”

“I didn’t–” Alex interrupts, biting at her lip. Strand rubs circles against the small of her back, murmuring his encouragement for her to continue. “I mean, I don’t know. For sure. I was dropped off in Tuwiuwok when I was two, then I went into the foster system in Halifax.”    

“There are some photos that the Chen’s had, before John’s death. And your – her, um, her birth certificate.” Chloe shifts in the armchair to offer them to Alex. “If you would like to see those.”  

Alex nods, pulling the album and the manila folder into her lap. She clears her throat to make sure she’ll make it through the next sentence without her voice cracking. “I guess Ruby can stop that extensive search of hers for my middle name.”  

Strand hums in response. She can feel the vibration of it in his chest as he shifts closer, his arm sliding around her waist. He drops a kiss onto her hair.  

“I’ll let her know,” he says, playing along at her attempt to break through the tension that’s building up in her.    

Opening the folder, she drags a fingertip across the text and the two ink-stained footprints at the bottom. Alexis Louise Chen, born at 8:21 p.m. on March 22nd, 1981.  

“Right on the cusp of Pisces and Aries,” Strand mutters, pleased when she gets the reference that coaxes a small grin out of her for a fleeting second.  

Tucking the paper back into the folder, she shifts it underneath to open up the album. The first pages are full of black-and-white images of a dark-haired little boy and a light-haired little girl, who grow up over the next few pages to a dark-haired man standing in blue graduation robes and a light-haired woman standing in red robes. The seventies are alive and well in their outfits as their photos merge, becoming the two of them standing side-by-side in Boston Common and on UMass’s campus, holding up peace signs. The trend continues in their wedding photographs: the man in a powder-blue tuxedo and the woman in a long-sleeved lace dress, her feathered curls tucked underneath the veil she wears. A few Polaroid shots follow of them hanging out of a VW bus in bathing suits, the beach a creamy white and the ocean a dark green behind them. There’s the baby shower and the first photos of Alexis, who glares up at the camera with her brown eyes, her hair a fluff of even darker brown. The subsequent pages are filled with baby Alexis: swaddled in her mother’s arms; propped up on the couch, laughing at something behind the lens; smashing cake into her mouth.  

The last photo of the family was taken during the fall, the three dressed in sweaters and scarves, Alexis in a puffy, red jacket. They’re standing in front of a pumpkin patch as Alexis sits atop an enormous pumpkin, her parents’ hands on either shoulder as they all smile for the picture.

Four blank pages separate the next photos, which feature a different little girl as she plays with a doll; poses in a dress underneath a tree; holds out a bag full of candy, dressed as a cowgirl. The photos stop abruptly when she looks to be about six or seven, the last one of her waving at the camera as she sits on a dock, sunshine bouncing off the lake behind her.       

“Can I–” Alex stops to clear her throat, her fingers crinkling the smooth plastic of the pages. “Would it be possible for us to take the box with us? It would just be for the day. We can bring it back tomorrow once we’ve looked through everything.”

Chloe’s gaze is steady as it meets Alex’s uncertain one. “Take it.”

“Thank you. Like I said, we’ll bring it–”

“No. I mean: take it.”

“Oh, no. We – I couldn’t. These are your wife’s things.”  

“Which I dug through with her for twelve years,” Chloe points out. “And it’s not like we’ll never see each other again. I’d like you to come visit, get to know Autumn outside of this box of family secrets.”

Alex shakes her head. “We don’t even know, not for sure if I’m–”

“Then, if you find out different, you can bring it back. I’m not a woman that believes in fate, but I feel like this is certainly more than just a coincidence.” Rising up from her seat, Chloe crosses the small room to sit on the coffee table across from her. She reaches out to place her hand over Alex’s, giving it a comforting squeeze. “Take the box.”

“Thank you,” Alex whispers, not trusting her voice if she tries for anything louder. Chloe, seeming to realize this, grips her hand and squeezes once more.

 

\------

 

Alex whistles as they enter Strand’s Lincoln Park apartment. “Wow, what a bachelor pad.”  

It’s all clean, modern lines in about twenty shades of black and gray and white – a far cry from the warm, aged interior of his house in Seattle. Though, she realizes, with a view of downtown Chicago like the one out the windows, one wouldn’t need to care about what the interior looked like.  

“I like it,” Strand shrugs as he moves through the open kitchen, finding and opening a bottle of wine, glad he had Ruby run by this morning and stock the essentials. “It’s... simple.”

Alex gives another cursory look around the apartment and notes the Kandinsky print hanging above the gas fireplace.  

“It looks like a _House Hunters_ couple’s wet dream.”

His brows scrunch down in confusion. “What?”

She doesn’t bother explaining. Instead, she presses her nose as close to the glass as she dares, the street a dizzying amount of floors below. There’s a brief shuffling behind her before Steve Winwood’s voice filters into the room, soft and melodic. Strand comes to stand beside her, his reflection’s gaze settled firmly on her.  

“Are you all right?”

The glass fogs, the view of the city disappearing under the haze of it. “I don’t know.”  

“We can take a break,” he offers. “Go out, get some dinner, see the city.”

“You’ve got quite a view from here.”  

“That I do.” His voice is honey-warm.  

“Ugh,” she scoffs playfully, her nose wrinkling as she turns to him. “What Harlequin novel did you pull that out of?”

“If I did, it would be from one of those in the drawer of your nightstand.”  

“I checked my reflection in your fancy entryway mirror. My mascara is definitely running. I look like Sally Field when she has to bury Julia Roberts.”

“I know one of those names, but I don’t know what that means.”

“It means this is the part of a romance novel where you tell me I look beautiful, even though I look like a raccoon.”  

His lips do a little dance, as if trying to decide whether or not to laugh at her joke. She saves him from answering by nudging him backwards against the window and setting her lips on his.  

The cold glass at his back sends a shiver through him before her hands come up to settle at his waist. Warmth spreads through him at her touch. Her fingers bunch up his shirt as she holds him to her. He’s helpless to not reciprocate.  

After a long moment, he breaks the kiss to press his lips against her forehead, then the crown of her head as she turns to lay it against his chest. He feels her intake of breath, the choppy sound of it as she attempts to reign in the barrage of emotions she’s been dealt with today.

It would be easy. To tell her now, to open the spillway and let all the secrets come tumbling out, to release the pressure of the dam he’s built around himself.  

But it would be terrible of him to do it now, when all of these maybes have been dumped into her lap. Maybe she was Alexis Chen; maybe her mother tried to kill her; maybe she tried to make it right by drowning herself, believing it the only path to take. He’s still unsure of it all, not wanting to believe without some viable proof, but it’s enough to know that Alex believes it might be possible.      

“We’ll stay in. I can order out, pour us a few glasses of wine. How’s that sound?”

“Good.”

“Good.”

 

\------

 

Copper blooms across the horizon outside the windows, the city skyline picturesque as the setting sun hovers beside the Sears Tower. Inside, the same color dances in the fireplace, casting an orange glow across the sleek furnishings. The coffee table is littered with white paper boxes and crumpled plastic wrappers. Two strips of paper lay forgotten on a plate, the fortunes having been read ( _Traveling this year will bring your life into greater perspective_ ) and scoffed at ( _You don't need the answers to all of life's questions, just ask your father what to do_ ).  

The items from Autumn’s box are scattered across the rest of the table and couch.  

There’s a wooden carving of a tree, each apple scrawled with a name of a descendant of Daniel and Patsy, along with their birth and death dates. Alexis’s name is on the newest apple, with 1981 scribbled underneath. There are letters from unnamed family members writing Catherine, asking her to play the record. Underneath those are newspaper clippings from the _Herald_ when Helen Archer, daughter of Daniel and Patsy, claimed to be able to ‘mystically travel’ and was put into an insane asylum for three years for it. Until she returned to society and claimed it was all due to alcohol.  

There are letters from Patsy after Helen’s release, writing to her relatives about concerns with her daughter’s ‘bouts of acute prescience,’ in which she seems to know things that were spoken in private, or events that happened without her knowing. She remarks on the drawings, writing about her daughter’s obsession with the number zero, and the strange markings she puts inside the number. At the bottom of the letter, an example is scratched in pencil: a four-leaf clover inside two circles, an eyeball in the clover’s center.   

 _Keep the tradition alive – we owe it to our family_ , the letters from Catherine’s parents repeat, the words phrased differently but the meaning the same. _She’s almost of age_ , Catherine’s mother writes to her in the spring of 1983. _Play it for her_.  

From the corner of the room, the Don Henley record slows to a stop. The lack of noise brings Alex out of her light doze on the couch. She’s curled against Strand’s side, his hand slowly moving up and down her arm.  

“Do you want to play it?”  

Nestled beneath the vaguely-threatening letters is a vinyl record, untitled, that sits in a plastic sleeve. The only clue they have is a note taped to the cover in Autumn’s handwriting: _bad meditation music_.  

Alex thinks about making a poor attempt at a joke of Strand being psychic, but she’s too worn down for it. Instead, she nods, sitting up as he pushes off the couch and takes the record over. She follows, watching as he sets it onto the turntable and lowers the needle.  

At first, it’s nothing but soft crackles as the record turns. It feels like she’s in a horror movie, watching it spin, waiting for that jumpscare at the end of the hallway.  

Every hair on her body stands on end as the first notes finally play, filling the room with that familiar, haunting melody. She reaches for Strand’s hand where it rests on the cabinet, gripping him tightly as the tune continues, the eerie cadence occasionally broken by the crackles of the old grooves.  

Movement catches her eye. A shadow moves back behind an armchair in the corner, inching closer as the music reaches its crescendo. She wrenches the needle from the record, the audio screeching before the apartment is quiet again.  

The shadow slinks away, until it dissipates into the flickering firelight.  

Strand switches off the player, his narrowed gaze fixed to the record.  

“It’s the Mysterium.”         

“It does sound very similar.”  

“No, it is – it haunted my dreams for months. When I thought it was just the Unsound, and I thought I’d die in a year and then...” Alex swallows back the rest of that sentence. “I just... I’d know it anywhere.”

“The question is how did it come to be passed down through the Archer family? And why do they think playing it can unleash some sort of... ‘acute prescience’?”  

“Because it can.” Her claim draws a skeptical look. “I’m serious. Duris’s theory about some melody being able to unlock a person’s potential to see this... other side, but there being a layer between what normal people can see and how others can see farther, like Simon said. It makes sense. It’s like a... like a more advanced version of music therapy. If I am Alexis Chen, then my first exposure to it may have been too young to matter, but when we played it for the podcast, that’s when a lot of my... dreams started.”

“You think a song caused you to be able to bilocate?”  

She shakes her head. “I think I always could bilocate, but the song tapped me into the potential. Unlocked the door, so to speak.”

“We might never know,” Strand reasons. “Autumn and Catherine were cremated, and I don’t think you have enough evidence for an exhumation for a DNA test to confirm with John.”  

Something hard settles in her gaze at his words, his pulse quickening at the sight.  

“No, but I know where I was on the night of October 29th, 1983.”  

He grips her shoulder, tightening his hold as he speaks. “If you go back, if you alter the timeline at all–”

“I know, I know, butterfly effect rules.” Her hand comes up to cover his. “But I have to go back to that fire station. I need to know for sure.”

Strand’s features relax, the line of his jaw loosening before he crosses the room to get a marker for her. She watches him hover at the kitchen counter for a moment, scribbling something down onto a paper that he tucks into his pocket.  

“What did you write?”

“You can find out when you get back.”

 

\------

 

It’s dark when she steps out from beside an abandoned gas station, the old sign scratched and tarnished. The milky light from the moon isn’t enough to make out much more than the distant shapes in the darkness. A stretch of highway winds alongside her, one way leading to more darkness and the other leading to the hazy glow of a nearby town.

It’s strange to her that the sigil would bring her here, when there’s no fire station in sight. Nothing at all in sight, really. Tucking her arms around her chest, Alex grumbles to herself about not bringing a jacket. On the other side, Strand is draping a blanket over her other self’s shoulders. If she strains, she can hear the soft hiss of the gas fireplace.

Five minutes, then ten, then twenty go by as she tucks herself up against the building, out of the cold wind that seems to chill her down to the bone.  

Finally, a car.  

She can see it coming from the east, cresting up and down over the hills, the yellow headlights shining against the pine trees on either side of the road. When it gets close enough, she can hear it, too, as it sputters and whines, using the last of its fuel to crest the next hill where Alex waits. The car pulls off the road and into the parking lot, bouncing as it drives over the ruined asphalt and parks, the engine still running. The driver gets out and crosses the front of the car. The headlights reveal Catherine Chen, bundled into a coat. She opens the passenger door and scoops a child into her arms, bouncing her as she whines.  

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” The child cries louder when Catherine sets her down, her tiny arms reaching up for her mother, the hood of her puffy, red jacket falling back. “No, Alex, Mama – Mama has to go. But here.” Catherine turns back to the car, Alexis wobbling after her, stopping when she turns around and hands her a stuffed rabbit. “You’ll have Bunny with you, okay?”  

Alexis shakes her head, babbling about her Mama. “No, Mama has to go. I’m sorry, baby. But you’ll be safe here. Someone is going to come along and get you, and you’ll be safe. They’ll take good care of you.”

Catherine looks back at the vehicle, which continues to sputter as it idles. Then she presses a kiss to her daughter’s forehead and hops back into the car.

Then she drives away.  

Alexis starts running the short distance to the roadside, sobbing as she sucks in deep breaths to continue when she runs out of air. Her little coughs and calls for her mother are the only sound in the world. Alex puts a hand over her mouth, trying to keep quiet as her own tears fall.  

The car’s taillights disappear again and again over the hills, the only color in the dark world. Two red dots appear on the horizon a final time and the memory slams into her: the two red eyes, peering at her from the darkness. It hadn’t been a monster, though, but a childhood memory warped by trauma and time.

She waits five long, horrible minutes, waiting for Catherine, knowing that she’ll turn around and take the little girl to the fire station. Then five more minutes go by and she waits for anyone to come by and notice the child standing too close to the road, calling out for her mother, waiting for her to come back.  

No one comes.  

Stepping out of her hiding spot, Alex starts walking down the road to where the child now sits, her little sneakers skidding in the crumbled pavement as she rocks and wobbles, her sobs lessening as she tires herself out. She must hear Alex coming because her head snaps up.  

“Mama?” Alexis calls, her little eyes widening when she gets her answer.  

“No, I’m...” Alex stops, debating on what to say, when she realizes it won’t matter anyway. “I’m here to take you somewhere safe.”  

Alexis repeats her demand for her mother, then relents to Alex’s open arms, and lets herself be picked up. She babbles nonsensically, Alex only able to catch actual words here and there as she rubs the toddler’s back, trying to keep her warm as they make their way down the road toward the glow of town.

The fire station is the first building she finds with its lights on. Through the tall glass door, she can see men milling about behind the truck, chattering as they clean. Moving to the front door, she sets Alexis down on the stoop and instructs her to wait.  

“These nice men are going to take care of you,” Alex tells her when she asks again after her mother. She crouches, brushing the dark hair out of the little girl’s face. “But I swear to you, you’re going to be okay. It won’t seem like it at first, but things will get better. A good family is going to take care of you, and love you, and – and you’re going to meet so many nice people, and they’re going to love you a whole lot, and you’ll love them a whole lot in return. Okay?”

Alexis looks up at her with those big, brown eyes, not really understanding but nodding anyway. She brushes at her own tears with the back of a chubby hand.  

“Okay,” she repeats.  

 

\------

 

When Chris O’Callaghan answers the bell at the door, he’s met with a little girl and her stuffed rabbit, waiting patiently for him on the front steps.  

“Hey there, now, honey. What are you doing here? What’s your name?” He reaches for her, picking her up and setting her on his hip as he scans the dark road.  

“’m Alex.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Mama left.”

Chris scans the street one last time before pulling the door closed behind them. “Okay, that’s okay. Come on, then, Alex, we’ll warm you up and we’ll find out what happened now, all right? How’s that sound?”  

“Okay.”

“Okay, then.”

Alex listens as the door shuts, their conversation fading. She moves from her crouched position beside the station and rounds the building, breaking into a jog when she reaches the street, trying to keep her breathing steady as she fights the overwhelming heartache that pulses in her chest. Keeping to the shoulder of the road, she makes it a quarter mile before she stumbles over a rock amidst the gravel. Twin bursts of pain shoot up through her wrists as she catches herself. Her breath hitching on a sob, she curls up to kneel on top of the pavement and covers her face with her hands, muffling her cries. The smell of oil and earth clogs her nose.  

The night watches on, uncaring.

Then, from down the dark road: voices. One man, then two, and possibly a third. Though their words are lost to the distance, they talk in short, elevated phrases. They sound angry. All at once, Alex recalls Catherine’s promise of someone coming for her.  

Curiosity spiking through her, she scrambles up off the pavement and keeps to the shoulder to get closer. The gas station is up ahead, the weak moonlight highlighting the metal sign. Shapes move in the darkness in front of the building. Skirting around a patch of loose gravel, she continues forward. Metal pops and creaks, the whine of it echoing across the empty road.

She doesn’t place the sound until it’s too late.

Headlights flare on, blinding her. A car roars to life, drowning out the men as they shout at her. Alex spins on her heel and rushes into the tree line. Vision spotted, she throws her hands out in front of her and runs, trying to gain distance before they can reach the woods.  

Gravel bites at the tires as the car brakes hard, skidding on the pavement. Doors whine open and slam shut.

Alex freezes. She twists slowly at the waist to look back. The headlights bear down on the trees, but with the dense undergrowth and thick trunks, the light only reaches fifty or so feet ahead.  

The men call out to her, beckoning her to come out. When she doesn’t respond, they step out in front of the light and start towards the trees. Their first mistake, because now she can see where they are, where their two shadows block the light. But it also means that they might be able to spot her.  

She moves farther back into the dark cradle of the woods, letting the shadows and distance dampen her noise, trying to keep her breathing steady.

 _Act now, panic later_ , she chants to herself.  

Foliage crunches. Limbs creak and snap as the men move into the trees after her. But they’re stupid. They call out, asking her to come back just so they can talk. They just have a few questions, and they promise to not hurt her.  

Alex picks up a rock and, having spotted a clear line through the trees, throws it far to her left, where it cracks against a tree trunk and skitters into the leaves. Like dogs, they turn immediately for the sound, chasing it down.  

Paying close attention to the forest floor, she recalls playing hide-and-seek with Perry and the other neighborhood kids, of how they’d wander far out into the woods behind their house, over their fence and onto the Mayfield’s land to play. She is skilled in the art of avoiding low-hanging branches, of stepping over logs instead of on top of them, lest they crack under her weight. The first one to the house without getting caught was the winner.  

Alex circles the men, letting them draw themselves deeper in while she heads for the road that’s visible now through the trees. Slipping through the bushes on the roadside, she steps out onto the shoulder. A hundred feet or so up the road is the car, its engine rumbling as it waits.  

She turns, her boots clicking against the asphalt as she jogs towards the gas station, smirking when she hears the men’s distant calls.  

“Hey!” comes a voice, closer than the rest. The third possible man. The one they must’ve left at the car. “Hey, come back here!” he demands, his feet stomping against the pavement after her.

She bolts.  

Her lungs burn from the frigid air as she sprints down the road, the metal sign her beacon home. The man shouts again, louder.  

Adrenaline courses through her. He’s close, but there’s no time to look back.

She tears across the gravel lot and around the building, her palms scraping against the brick as she searches for her sigil. 

“Come on, come on!” she hisses, smacking the wall. Under her skin, the drawing sparks to life.

Footsteps pound against the grass behind her. A hand reaches for her.  

“Come here, you bi–”

The door opens.  

And then there’s Strand, waiting for her as she tumbles back into his living room and into his arms, where he gathers her against his chest.

She lets go.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, keeping his grip on her as he follows her down to the floor. “You’re safe, Alex. I’ve got you.”

“These men, they were chasing me, but I...” she shakes her head, every muscle in her body following suit. “And she just – she left me there, on the side of the road. She just – and she – no one came. I just sat there, waiting for her to–” she cuts herself off, trying to drag air in through her nose to steady her heaving lungs. Strand tucks her against him, murmuring soothing nonsense into her hair. “I waited for her to come back, but she never did. I couldn’t – I had to do something.”

He thinks of the memory she’d told him, of the red eyes and the soothing hands, carrying her out of the cold. Understanding floods through him.

“You’re the one who brought her,” he tells her, his words steady and reassuring. “You were always the one who was going to save her. You saved yourself.”  

“She – I was all alone, she left me there and I was just waiting for her to... thinking she would come back. I had no other choice, I had to–”

“No, I know. It’s all right. I’ve got you,” he repeats, pressing his lips to her hair. “You’re safe, Alex. I’ve got you.”

Helpless to do anything else, she nods against him as her tears continue to fall.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only allusion to speak of (to my knowledge) was a minuscule reference to _Steel Magnolias_.   
> The whole idea of the red 'eyes' watching Alex from the darkness memory was originally supposed to be touched on in ATM, but then it got moved over to ITP, and it's actually the singular line I built this entire story around (well, that and Simon's love of talking about doors).   
> And with this chapter, we're officially past the half-way point (and ever-closer to that explicit content I tagged).


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we finally earn that explicit rating.

They arrive back on the west coast by noon, thanks to an early flight and the wonder of time zones.  

Alex sends Strand home so he can catch up on his teaching plans for the next week, though it’s really because she needs a few hours to spend alone and let her thoughts settle. He seems to understand this, letting her know that he’ll call her later.  

Being alone is nice for the first hour, before all the quiet and emptiness starts to wear on her. Amalia had left that morning, a note taped to the fridge timestamped just after seven saying that she was headed to Düsseldorf for another story. Below the well-wishes for a happy birthday, she’d drawn a rough sketch of Relay and her spread out on the couch, wine bottles and takeout layered in piles around them.  

Having abandoned her social media for the weekend, Alex snaps a photo of the drawing and posts it to Twitter. Satisfied that she’s marked one item off her to-do list, she grabs her muddied sneakers and clips Relay’s leash on.  

The two set off down the street and across campus, rounding the football stadium and crossing over Montlake Bridge, where they head east along the waterfront trail that leads to Foster Island. Packs of bicyclists pass by on the 520 trail as they cross it, cutting through the soccer field on the way back home.  

At the last big intersection before her street, she pulls her phone out of her jacket to check the replies that have flooded in since her post. Most, to no surprise, are wishing her a happy birthday, following it up by asking about the release of a new episode. She responds to a few of them, liking the ones that make her laugh, and is about to cryptically reply to a user asking if she and Strand ‘are ever going to get together IRL’ when her brother’s face pops up on the screen.   

“Good morning, birthday girl!”  

“You realize it’s past noon, right?”  

“Maybe for you all up north, but down here it’s still morning. I like to call it California time.”  

Alex snorts. “Is that what you’re going to tell your boss when you’re late for work tomorrow morning?”

“No, I tell him that I hit traffic at the 280 split. Because there’s always traffic at the split. But anyway,” he drags out the last word as something clatters to the floor in the background, “I didn’t call to talk to you about traffic. I called to wish my amazing sister a happy birthday.”

“Thank you.” Used to his tone, she waits for the other shoe to drop.  

“But I also called because Mom hasn’t stopped bothering me. She’s worried about you.”

 _Ah, there it is_.

“Why?” she drags out the word, imitating her brother.

“Because you asked about all that adoption stuff.”

“I feel like it’s normal for a woman in her mid-thirties to have questions about her biological parents.”

“It would be in any other family, but it’s you. Mom expected this kind of stuff when you were eighteen, not now.” There’s a rustling sound on the other end of the line, as Perry sighs into the receiver. “Listen, you know how she gets. Just–”

“Call her and let her know that I’m not going to abandon you all because I found my ‘real’ family?” She lets out a dry chuckle as she crosses the street, keeping the leash short as Relay tries to sniff every ankle that passes by. “No chance of that happening, anyway.”

“What’d you find out?”  

“Hmm, well you’re the one who called me on my birthday to dump family drama on me–”

“Hey you started it first by–”

“–so you’ll have to wait for next season to find out.”

“You’re the worst,” Perry tells her, which she interrupts with a laugh. “This is a season five finale of _Buffy_ cliffhanger you’re giving me right now.”

She’s halfway down her block before she realizes that Strand’s car is parked in front of her house. And if she hurries Relay along so she can get home faster, it’s just because of the cold.

Perry’s voice drifts back to her, “–so if you could tell Mom to chill the fuck out, minus the cursing, that’d be great. I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your birthday.”

She gets him off the phone just as she opens the front door, Relay dashing in around her to greet Strand. On the counter is a cake from her favorite bakery with a few candles stuck in it, waiting to be lit. A bouquet of flowers sits beside it; pale pink roses, white bouvardia, and English ivy spill out of the vase.

“I know you wanted some space, but I wanted to drop these–”  

Leaning up on the toes of her sneakers, she cuts him off with a kiss, startled when he reveals a present from behind his back. It’s beautifully wrapped, a woven bow expertly tied around it (which means Ruby did it and shipped it in layers of bubble wrap). “Happy birthday.”

“It isn’t even my real one.”

“It’s Alex Reagan’s birthday. And...” he pauses to lift the bow for her to see the small note attached. “...it’s addressed to you.”  

She smiles up at him. “Thank you.”  

“Ah, well, you haven’t even opened it yet.”

Untying the bow and popping the tape at the bottom, she unwraps it under his hesitant gaze. Knowing Strand, it will be a first-edition signed copy of something that was thought lost in the Library of Alexandria, or a dinner invite with Ira Glass. Instead, when she opens the wooden box, she’s met with legal documents: a vessel title application, an out-of-country registration. A thin folder below those contains a rental agreement for a boat slip at Elliot Bay Marina for the _Lady Ellen_ , good for three years.  

“I swapped contact information with Perry, who got me in touch with your mother. And, after a very lengthy phone conversation, she agreed to moving the boat down here. This way, she doesn’t have to worry about finding a new home for it.” He shifts his stance from foot to foot and wrings his hands together. “And Perry, of course, he could come up and use it, or we could bring your mother down for a weekend, take her out on it.”  

“Richard, this is... I can’t – you got me a boat.”

“Well, I didn’t – not really, I just helped move it down here. The slip at the marina, that’s really the only thing I got you, since–”

“You got me my dad’s boat,” she interrupts. Her eyes flit back and forth over the paperwork in her hands.

“Well, it’s your boat now, but yes.” When she doesn’t immediately respond, he grows nervous, and starts up again. “Of course, it is a lot. I understand if you don’t want to deal with such a responsibility. I really should have asked first, but Perry assured me that it was a great idea, and he’s your brother, so he should know. If you’re worried about–”

“When’s it being docked?”  

It’s not the question he’d been expecting, but if he blinks at it, she’s none the wiser as she continues poring over the documents, an unreadable expression on her face.

“It’s already here. You didn’t think I would give you a present you’d have to wait on, did you?”

He suppresses the urge to shift again as she finally looks up at him. Relief spreads through him as she smiles, the corners of her mouth wobbling slightly.

“Richard, I–”  

“We can go this evening.” The words rush out of him, unbidden, his nerves still getting the better of him. “If you’d like,” he sheepishly adds.

She seems to forgive him for the interruption, her eyes warm with something that makes his heart beat (if even possible) faster.

“Do you know how to operate a boat?”

“Ah, no. But I have it on good authority that you do.”

 

\------

 

The floating docks at the marina seem to stretch on for miles as Alex makes the instructed turns, repeating them to herself aloud as her boots smack against the concrete. Strand follows, a cooler strapped across his back, urging her to go on ahead when she slows down, waiting for him to catch up.  

It’s been years since she stepped foot on the boat, excluding her excursion into the past earlier in the week. The memory of that awful, bright blue carpet, rough against her feet springs to mind. She wiggles her toes inside her boots as she stands at the last corner with Relay, waiting on Strand before she continues.  

She looks as beautiful as she did twenty-five years ago, her chrome fittings polished to a shine, her forest-green hull gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The tacky blue carpet is long gone, having been replaced a decade ago with fresh, stain-resistant beige. The brown vinyl seats were torn out around the same time, too; in their place are white bench seats, tucked into the corners of the bridge. Painted across the back in that familiar cursive font is her name. Alex resists dragging her fingers across it.  

“Oh my god!” she springs back from the boat, whirling to face Strand.

He turns a critical eye toward the boat. “What? What is it?”

Relay pays the two no mind as he hops aboard and begins his inspection.  

“I forgot to thank you,” she says. “Really, thank you. This is – honestly, this is the best birthday gift I’ve ever been given. And I know getting a slip here didn’t come easy.” _Or cheap_ , she thinks, noticing the newer and fancier boats docked around them.   

He’s quiet for a moment, as if deciding on what he wants to say. Holding out his hand, he helps her up onto the bridge, setting the cooler down to rest an arm around her waist and pull her close.

“Perry told me how much you loved it, being out on the water, being out on this boat. I couldn’t sit by and let that be taken away from you. And with everything in such an upheaval, I wanted to give you a place, somewhere close where you could still go to get away from it all.”  

She slides her own arm around his hips and squeezes him close to her for a beat.  

“I bet the shipping was easy, too, huh?”

“I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” Strand asks after a lengthy sigh.  

Alex nods, chuckling when she catches sight of his expression. “But really, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“C’mon, I’ll let you be my first mate.”  

 

\------

 

Despite the cold day, which the windscreens and the bridge’s heater combat, the water is nice and smooth. Alex guides them out of Elliot Bay, idling until they reach the open water of the sound. Once there, she kicks in the twin engines and they set off across the channel. To the west, the ferry makes its way to Bainbridge Island. Houses are scattered along the beaches and up into the short hills of the island, just boxes of red, white, and gray. Back to the southeast, the mountain is out, its snowcapped peak commanding the afternoon sky.  

Relay bounces from one side of the boat to the next, leaping across Alex’s lap where she sits in the captain’s chair, then over to where Strand is stretched out on the bench seat, taking in the sights and sounds.  

At the tip of Port Madison, movement catches their attention as a small pod of orcas break the water, their white bellies flashing bright against the dark green water. Alex gives them a wide berth as they circle around to Agate Point, where she sets the anchors down and cuts the engines. The sudden lack of noise is broken by the splash of their wake against the rocky shoreline.  

The wind coming off the water is too chilly for a dinner out on the bow, so they keep inside the bridge, laying out the dinner and whiskey Strand brought. They debate on which album to play on the tape deck that her dad never got rid of.  

Alex holds the final two up in either hand, surprised when Strand points to the one on the left.  

“Really? I had you pegged more as a _Message in a Bottle_ kind of guy.” She chuckles at her own joke, to his obvious confusion.  

“That’s not the album title.”  

She encourages him to forget about it as she pushes the tape in; Lindsey Buckingham’s voice comes bouncing through the speakers.  

They’re starting on the whiskey for their dessert when Alex gets up from the bench seat to flip the tape over. Turning back from the sound system, she runs an appreciative eye over Strand as he lounges along the seat. Sticking out from under the blanket, his socked feet bob to the opening chords of the song, his shirt unbuttoned just enough from the warmth of the bridge. With the sun disappearing behind the land to the west, it tinges the sky a reddish-orange, the colors bringing out the threads of gray in his hair.  

Unable to resist, she brings her phone up and snaps a photo of him.  

Alex (6:17 pm): _Happy birthday to me_

Perry (6:17 pm): _what!! I’m jealous_    

She settles back in her place across the seat from Strand, shoving her feet under his legs for warmth as she tugs the blanket closer, ignoring his half-hearted protest. She sends another photo of her view: a whiskey in hand, Strand with his eyes closed opposite her.  

Perry (6:18 pm): _this wasn’t on your amazon wish list_

Perry (6:18 pm): _don’t_ _be upset when UPS doesn’t drop off a boat with my present_

Alex (6:18 pm): _Don’t act surprised I know you were in on it_

He sends her an incomprehensible string of emojis. She briefly wonders why it is that she’s the one with the job in media, yet she feels older when talking to him.  

Perry (6:20 pm): _you have to let me borrow her_

Perry (6:20 pm): _help_ _me convince my date that I’m a man with worldly possessions_

Alex (6:20 pm): _If you can find a man that spends more time getting a natural tan from the sun than one from a bed, let me know and I’ll hook you up_

Perry (6:21 pm): _since it’s your birthday I won’t call you names_

Perry (6:21 pm): _but your right_

Perry (6:21 pm): _now stop bothering me while I’m neck deep in paperwork for this conference and enjoy the company of your handsome boyfriend_

Perry (6:21 pm): _also tell him I say hello_

Alex (6:22 pm): _good night and good luck_

He sends her a red heart, and then a winking face, and she mutes the conversation before she has to see the rest.  

Alex nudges Strand with her foot. “My brother says hello.”

“I heard your camera shutter go off,” he says, the corners of his lips twitching. “Are you two making _The Old Man and the Sea_ jokes?”

“I can assure you that my brother will never make a Hemingway reference in his entire life. He burned his copy of _A Farewell to Arms_ in high school because it was, according to him, ‘the worst insult to trees since the invention of the printing press.’”

That gets him to open his eyes, meeting her gaze as he lets out a short laugh, which she can’t help but join in on.  

The moment settles between them. Strand breaks away to watch the liquor slosh to the rim as he swirls his whiskey. He likes it out here, on this island they’ve made of the boat and them, Relay snoring at their feet. Nothing can bother them here, left only to the sound, the waves softly knocking against the hull.  

“You know, ten years ago the Kennedy Library released letters from Hemingway and German actress Marlene Dietrich. They were love letters, mostly, that spanned almost twenty years – though they never ended up together.”  

Alex takes a sip of whiskey, humming as she recalls. “‘Victims of unsynchronized passion,’ right?”  

He can feel her eyes on him as looks to the east, where dusk blooms dark blue behind the hills, and nods. “Right. Well, I admit that I always thought... you and I, well, I always thought that would be the two of us. Ships passing in the night, you know, and all of those other idioms. I have never been more pleased to be proven wrong.”

Alex nudges her foot against his inner thigh, grinning.  

“Oh, really?”

“Yes,” he says with a quick nod in her direction, flashing her a quick, shy smile. “Really.”

“Those are rare words, coming out of your mouth.” She pushes the blanket off her waist and sits up, laying a hand on his knee. “I should’ve brought my recorder.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would’ve been wise,” he tells her, his voice gone to that deep place in his chest. He offers his hand, urging her closer, drawing her in until she’s straddling his thighs. The base of her spine tingles with anticipation as he brings his hand up to push back the dark curtain of her hair, his thumb tracing the corner of her lips. “You would have to cut out a lot of the next few hours.”

“Mmm, do tell.”

His hand splays across the small of her back, until she tips forward enough for him to capture her lips. She sighs into it, settling into his lap, propping herself up against the cushion behind his head. Tilting her head, she deepens the kiss, letting out a little gasp when he slips his fingers under her shirt. Shivers follow the trail of his touch as he skims along the skin of her abdomen. Never one to be beaten, Alex rolls her hips down into his, satisfaction curling quick and hot in her belly at his muffled groan of her name.  

She makes quick work of the next few buttons of his shirt, pushing the two sides apart so she can run a hand down his chest, giving his skin the slightest hint of her nail.  

The hand woven into her hair urges her to meet his gaze. Those blue eyes of his are potent, slowing her quick advance as he tips her head down, their lips meeting in the barest of a kiss, just a brush of skin against skin. It’s the softness of it that somehow quickens her pulse, a simple precursor to the main event.  

From somewhere across the water, a horn blares, bringing Relay out of his nap. Awake and interested in the two of them, he trots over to stick his wet nose against the bare skin of Alex’s waist.  

She jumps at the contact, stopping the trail of Strand’s mouth against her neck when she pulls away to coax the dog to go back to sleep. Strand settles both hands on her waist, his thumbs brushing the soft skin there, chuckling when Relay continues to watch the two of them, panting happily.  

“We can always continue this downstairs.”  

Alex raises an eyebrow at him. “In the sheets that probably haven’t been changed since Clinton was sworn in.”

“I may have gotten new bedding for the front bedroom, and had someone clean the boat when it arrived yesterday.”

“Presumptuous, aren’t you, getting new sheets?”  

That familiar smirk of his returns, matching hers. “I prefer ‘prepared.’”  

They make quick work of gathering the blankets and heading down the short set of stairs, settling Relay down in the tiny living area before they continue down the narrow hallway to the aft cabin.  

Strand barely gets the door shut before he finds himself up against it, Alex obviously eager to resume their previous festivities. His position gives her the chance to deal with the rest of his buttons, though that task proves difficult when he sets his lips back on hers. With her hands trapped between their bodies, his other hand slips down to undo the button of her jeans.

“Not fair,” she growls against his lips.  

He huffs out a laugh as he mouths along the gentle curve of her throat, catching the skin between his teeth. Alex inhales, sharp and quick, when his fingers drag down to trace the edge of her underwear. She retaliates by wrapping her fists around the two panels of his shirt and tugging him backwards to the bed, spinning them at the last moment.  

Giving in to her silent demand, Strand drops down to sit on the edge, keeping her in his grasp as he kisses down the length of her stomach where her shirt has ridden up. His tongue grazes against the soft lace of her underwear that peeks out from her jeans.  

Alex makes that noise he loves, the short, breathy whine that seemed to invade his dreams long before he ever had the pleasure of making love with her.  

“Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” he asks, his voice gone rough with arousal.

“Oh, mmm-hmm,” she nods, running her hands through his hair at his temples, responding to everything but the question.  

Tugging her closer, he urges her down onto his lap, where he can attend to the neglected parts of her. She lifts up onto her knees and he follows her up, up, straining to keep his mouth on her. He mutters a protest when she breaks their kiss, but quickly quiets when she peels off her shirt and unhooks her bra, letting both drop to the floor. Sliding her hands up through his soft hair, she guides and he follows, a dying man to water, capturing and worshipping her with his mouth, both hands splayed across her back, steadying her as she moves against him.    

Heat crawls slow and sweet up through her belly as his hand smooths down her skin until it reaches the vee of her thighs. Those long fingers dip down into her open jeans and drag two lines of sweet pressure against her, making her draw breath. His tongue sweeps across her pebbled nipple once more before he moves, shifting to press a kiss to the skin between her breasts. He pulls away, his gaze snapping up to meet hers. It’s like he’s taken a match to her nerve endings, having that single-minded focus completely set on her.  

Annoyed at his sudden retreat, Alex rolls her hips down into his, making her request clear. He tangles his fingers into the hair that falls to her mid-back and gently tugs until she lets her head fall back, exposing the flushed skin of her throat. His stubble tickles against her, the air emptying out of her lungs when he bites at the skin just underneath her ear, soothing the bloom of pain with a sweep of his tongue. A strangled gasp escapes her as she arches back, driving her hips down into his, pleasure smarting through her veins when he moves with her, his erection pressing against her.   

From the speakers above on the bridge, Stevie Nicks croons, raspy and sweet, telling them to listen carefully to the sound.  

Keeping her wrapped tightly in his arms, Strand flips them, chuckling at Alex’s yelp of surprise. Settling her onto the bed, he slips off to crouch at the foot of the bed, tugging her jeans off as he goes. Wanting payback, Alex digs her toes into his sides, where she knows he’s ticklish; he retaliates, grabbing each ankle and urging them apart enough so he can slip in between her thighs.  

The breathless little noises she makes as he maps out her skin are sweet enough to bottle, to use as an ink that he could use to write the intimate symphony she creates. He’d call it _Anticipazione_ , and demand it be played _andante con moto_.  

Her heels dig into his back, two points of hard pressure, bringing him out of his thoughts. Giving in, he nips at the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, his fingers following in his wake.  

“Richard,” she breathes out.

“Yes, darling?” he answers, teasing her by skating his thumb across the front of her lacy underwear.

He waits for that next low whine before he strikes, licking a long stripe against her through her underwear, the lace tickling his tongue. Alex gasps, her knees drawing up on reflex but he holds her down, setting a pace that she’s left to try and keep up with. Her back arches, her body tightening as he finally pulls the damp patch of lace aside and devours her. She reaches down, carding her fingers through his hair until she finds purchase there to urge him where she wants him.  

“Oh, my god,” she attempts. Whatever comes out instead is a mess of vowels as she slides her other hand across her stomach and down to her clit, which she makes two swipes at before he replaces her fingers with his own, his thumb moving against her. Like kindling catching alight, she bursts, sparks spotting her vision for an instant before the oak ceiling of the cabin returns.  

“Oh, my god,” she tries again, her head lolling to the side.

“It’s my duty as a devout skeptic to remind you–”

“Your mouth could be making much better use by not talking,” she gripes playfully, tightening her hold on his hair, grinning when he chuckles, his hot breath brushing against her skin.   

They crawl up the bed and collapse back against the pillows, Strand holding her close as he traces the curve of her shoulder with his mouth. It feels like someone has tied strings around her insides and tugged, her lungs tightening as he moves lower, kissing at the underside of her breast, his thumb lightly brushing against her nipple, easing her down off her high.  

She shoves and tugs and pulls at his clothing until he’s naked beside her, stretched out across the dark blue sheets he chose. They bring out the darker flecks in his eyes, which he must have realized, which makes her grin, which makes him ask about her smile, which makes her kiss him to keep him quiet.

He hooks a finger around her underwear and slides it down her legs, letting his touch linger on the places that make her breath catch.  

“Come here,” he coaxes, curling around her. Sweeping her hair across the pillow, he presses his nose against the nape of her neck, tasting the sweat that’s beaded up along her skin there. His hand slips between her thighs to make gentle passes against her. Her skin is warm where she’s pressed against him, writhing under his ministrations. The sight and the sound and the feel of her reduce him to that base, primal form, everything else stripped away, leaving him a thing that _wants_.  

“Richard–” she starts, then stops, her lips parting with a cry when his fingers stop their light tease and sink into her. Little sparks of wet heat flare across her as Strand nips along her sweat-slicked skin, in those sweet spots that he could find no matter the light, no matter if he were to lose every degree of sight.  

He works another finger into her. She moves against him, driving her hips down so it’s all a little harder, a little rougher, until she feels that familiar throb, that heartbeat down deep. She abandons the sheets to wrap her hand around his, keeping him right where she needs him most. He slips his thumb out of her hold to brush her clit and it feels like every nerve in her body is expanding, trying to shove and push to freedom. She can’t seem to catch her breath. Biting at her lip, she keens as her hips roll again and again and – she comes, an electric jolt to her body that she desperately rides the waves of as he works her through it.  

Her body feels like honey pulled from a honeycomb to drip, slow and sweet. Strand hums against her skin as he props himself up to drag lazy kisses across her collarbone, his cock heavy and hard, pressing against the back of her thighs. She emits some sort of wordless demand, turning her head to meet him for a kiss, slipping her tongue in alongside his.  

He drags a palm along her heated skin until he finds purchase in her thigh and wraps his hand under it, tugging it up over his own. Breaking their kiss, he grips his cock, guiding it between her sex. He sinks into her, earning him a ragged gasp. Blindly, Alex reaches out, taking hold of his hand where it’s holding her thigh, and laces her fingers through his.  

Then he starts to move and it’s like her breath is knocked out of her lungs by something unseen. His fingers are like points of heat, digging trenches into her skin.  

He says her name, lips dragging across her temple as he seems to stress every letter. It might be her favorite word of his, the way her name works its way through that gravelly baritone.  

“That’s it,” he murmurs, moving down to nip at the flush on her throat.  

Her back arches and her hips roll to meet his thrusts, moving with him, his fourth movement; _Piacere_ , played _allegro con brio_. Dipping his head down, he swallows the pleased little moans she makes, rolling them around on his tongue like fine wine, tasting the intoxicating mixture of sweat and sex on her swollen lips. He hikes her leg up higher, changing the angle, moving deeper, to Alex’s obvious enjoyment as she slips a hand down to rub tight circles against herself. Pleasure sinks its claws in and holds tight, sharp and demanding as her orgasm slams into her, a spilling breaker of euphoria and oxytocin that she rides, her hips jerking and shuddering.  

And where she goes, he follows, choking out her name as he comes, clutching her tight to him.  

They both collapse back into the mess of sheets, catching their breath. Strand runs the tips of his fingers along her shoulder as she tucks her feet under his calf, snuggling close under the blanket that he pulls over them.    

Tipping her head back, Alex takes in the stars, visible through the cabin’s window. There’s a small scattering she can see under the haze of city lights in the far distance. Though they’re no match for the dizzying amount they laid under back in Idaho, she appreciates them just the same. Her thoughts drift to the man beside her and how he’d looked, backlit by that campfire. How the light had softened everything, much like the warm, honey-orange recessed lights in the cabin are doing now.  

“Your arm is going to fall asleep,” she warns him, pressing light, easy kisses on his chest that she’s curled against, his arm wrapped underneath her, holding her to him. He gives her a noncommittal hum and settles his lips against the crown of her head. The boat drifts gently from side to side as the wake from a passing boat knocks against it. From upstairs, the final keys play as the last song drifts off.

Alex follows, Strand not far behind.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No real author's note to end with for this one, just stating that I love Perry Reagan and wish he had more scenes in this story, but they were cut for flow, and live on... only in my memories... and in the draft on my hard drive. 
> 
> Terms / allusions:  
>  _anticipazione_ : anticipation  
>  _piacere_ : pleasure  
> Symphony-specific terms:  
>  _andante con moto_ : Slowly, but with motion  
>  _allegro con brio_ : At a fast tempo, and with spirit


	10. Chapter 10

There are five voicemails on her office phone when Alex gets to the studio a little after nine the next morning.  

The first is from Doctor Pullman, confirming that the tune she forwarded to him from Autumn’s record is the same as the Mysterium she sent him before. The second is from her mom requesting a callback to discuss how her birthday went, along with a small comment about how she should answer her cell phone more often. Simon is her third, leaving a two-second message: “We all have a choice, Alex,” which she promptly deletes.  

The fourth is the only one deserving of a prompt response. It’s a message from Doctor Martindale, wanting to speak about a new piece of information she’s uncovered from the documents they sent her. The fifth and final one is from Doctor Bernier’s cheery receptionist, who called Friday afternoon to see about setting up an appointment, since Alex cancelled her last one – and the one before that.  

She sends a quick email to the production team working on TANIS that she can’t making the meeting at ten, and calls Martindale back.

“Oh, you’re a fast one, aren’t you?” Today’s sweater is made of thick blue-and-white stripes, a red anchor and red starfish stitched across the chest. Emperor penguin earrings swing with the movement of her head as she talks. Her necklace, in what Alex assumes is an effort to clash with the maritime look, is made of charms in the shape of brass instruments.  

“I apologize if I interrupted anything,” Alex starts, but the other woman waves her concern away.  

“No, no worries, dear. You saved me from attending the English department’s guest lecture on an annotated version of _Wuthering Heights_ they’re putting out.” She rolls her eyes. “As if we all didn’t read it twenty times over in university.” Before Alex can attempt to get them back on course, Martindale does it herself by locating the piece of paper she reached out about. “Like I said in the message, this appears to be a story. Not very long, mind you. More like... like a premonition meets a book summary, almost.”

Alex nods her head, signaling her to continue.  

“It describes a Helvetian man as the first of four sons who brings a new religion to another land, destroys a heretic, and promotes God at a very specific point on earth.” She looks up from the paper to meet Alex’s eyes. “It also – well, it also mentions demons.”

“Demons?”

“Yes.” Martindale returns to the paper, scanning across it. “It depicts them traveling, possibly moving through something, in an attempt to come into this world.”  

“Does it say where this place is? This ‘specific place on earth’?”

“It describes a point of power, where a river meets a large body of water.”

“So, the ocean? A lake?”  

Martindale’s lips quirk from side to side. “Hmm, perhaps, yes.”       

“So, an evangelical Swiss man with three brothers kills someone and goes to an ocean–”

“–or lake.”

“–right, or a lake, and puts out an advertisement for God. Okay, anything else?”

The penguins wobble as Martindale shakes her head. “Nope, that’s all I’ve got.”

 

\------

 

“I mean, it has to be George Duris.” Nic sits across from her at a nearby café for lunch, where they’ve gone to escape the office while a donor tour goes through. “Right? That tweaky professor you talked to mentioned he was born in Switzerland.”

“Yeah, but that seems too... neat.” Alex's head wobbles back and forth, as if rattling the idea around in her brain. “Every other time we’ve had this solid of a lead, something else pops up and ruins what gain I thought I had.”

“Ahh, so you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”  

She nods at his assessment, piercing her salad with a fork. Scratching at his cheek, Nic sets his unfocused gaze somewhere over her shoulder for a moment in thought, before he shrugs.  

“I don’t know. I say not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”  

Alex levels a look at him over the cucumber slice she’s speared. “Do you only speak in idioms now?”

“Hey, it’s better than your friend Simon quoting motivational _Pinterest_ posts.”  

She tips her head in concession.  

They spend the next few minutes debating on where the place of power could be, and who the heretic was that Duris supposedly helped destroy. While Nic is busy googling something on her phone (his is in the jacket draped on the back of his chair, which was deemed too far away), he smirks and flips the phone around to face her. A text preview across the top bar notifies her of one new message from Strand.  

“Your boyfriend’s checking in on you.”

She snatches the phone out of his hand. “He’s not checking in on me. He just wants to know the latest from my conversation with Martindale.”

“Right,” Nic drags out the word around his bite of food. “Just like he asked me to keep you company if you went anywhere this week.” He holds up a placating hand as her mouth parts in protest. “As luck would already have it, we planned this lunch last week, anyway. But he’s right – you need to stick close to someone, whether it’s me or Strand or one of the interns. Hell, even take Terry out with you if no one else is free.”

She scoffs. “I’m not the main lead in some romance thriller, about to be whisked away by the villain at the hour-twenty mark.”

“Cut him some slack. He already had his wife disappear for twenty years at the hands of Warren. You can see how he’d be... less than enthusiastic about you going places alone.” It’s his turn to point at her with his fork. “Especially when there’s already a past history of him coming after you. Am I the only one at this table who remembers him sending goons after you all last year when you tried to interview him? Or do I need to remind you that he had you kidnapped from a parking lot in broad daylight last week?”

She resists the urge to rub at the back of her head, which still sports a small bump from her head meeting with the car door. “No, I do not need a reminder.”

Bringing the fork to his mouth, he chomps down in victory.  

“Okay, good. Now, there’s another tour scheduled at one – what do you say to some birthday macaroons from Rosemary’s?”   

“Only if we can get stuck behind a wreck at 40th and Ingram, so we can miss the one-thirty tour, too.”

“Sold.”

 

\------

 

Her house smells like a combination of wet dog and sautéed garlic with herbs. The answer to the former is the clean towel that sits next to the front door, still folded and neat on the side table where she dumps her purse and keys.  

“He went between the legs, didn’t he?”  

Alex makes her way into the kitchen, where Strand is drizzling olive oil into the pan on the stove. She wraps her arms around his hips, hugging him from behind and grinning against the fabric of his button-down when he answers her with a grumbling affirmation.  

“You need to sign that dog up for the NFL. He could be a linebacker with the brute strength he musters up when he wants to get inside this house.”  

Alex shifts to aim a dirty look at her dog. where he lays sprawled next to the fridge. He blinks up at her, showing how much he cares about her annoyance by stretching, his dirty paws leaving streaks across the clean floor. His trail through the house is marked by muddy chunks and shredded leaves.  

Thankful once again that the house came with a tub, she leans down and hefts him up into her arms, carrying him back to be scrubbed down, getting covered in enough of his mess to warrant a change of clothes. She tosses the dirty ones towards the hamper, realizing she can’t toss them in because of how much overflow it contains.

It’s been a very long week.  

Figuring that she’ll play home owner while Strand plays chef, she lugs the hamper down the hall and sets about separating the pile of it into proper loads. Mixed in with her clothes are some of his – lounge pants and sleep shirts and underwear, the stuff he doesn’t send off to be dry cleaned. She’s checking pockets for pens and humming along to the song he’s cued up on his phone (the soft French jazz he plays every time he cooks), when she finds a neatly-folded paper in the pocket of his dress slacks. Never one to ignore the siren call of hidden information, she opens it up, frowning at the message it contains.

“What?” she says to herself, flipping it over to make sure she hasn’t missed anything else, then back over to read the note again. Too curious to wait until the first load is done, she wanders back out to the kitchen. “What’s this?”  

Strand turns from the stove where he’s accrued another pan filled with some type of red meat. He takes the paper from her and unfolds it, his eyes widening at the message inside before he starts to fold it back into tight squares. Alex reaches out, catching his hands in hers, stopping him. “Richard, what does it mean?”

“It’s...” he sucks in a breath. “It means what it says.”

“’Find Alex Reagan slash Alexis Chen,’” she reads.

His gaze meets hers and he’s caught, an anchor line snagged under a rock, as she waits for an explanation.  

“Yes.” His monosyllabic response gets a single raised eyebrow. “I wrote it when you went back to Tuwiuwok, or – well, just before, actually.”  

She remembers now, him writing something down and then stuffing it into his pocket, waving away her question about it.  

“But why?”

He pushes a hand through his hair, shaking his head as he sets his eyes on the floor.  

“Logically, it makes no sense. If you had altered the past, I would have no knowledge of who you were or what had been done. Depending, of course, on how much it would have affected the present. But I felt like... I mean, last week I thought all of this – the abilities that Braun and Simon claimed to have were.... But now, with you, it all... I just, I thought that if there was a chance, that maybe I would somehow know. I would know to look for you, to make sure you were all right, if only to satisfy my own curiosity for leaving myself that note. But maybe...” he trails off with a shrug, only looking back up when she lays a hand on his chest.  

“You left yourself a note. To find me in whatever weird future I might’ve created, to make sure I was okay.”  

Her summary of the events is a lot more concise than his embarrassing fumble of an explanation. To keep it from happening again, he simply nods. Her eyes dart back and forth across his face before she nods once, seemingly more to herself, and throws her arms around him. Her cheek rubs against his chest as she nuzzles closer. She whispers something against the cotton that he doesn’t catch and asks her to repeat.  

She pulls back far enough to meet his gaze.  

“I love you,” she says again, loud enough for him to hear.  

“Oh,” he says on an exhale, as if he’s fit the last piece into the puzzle and is standing back, understanding the picture it makes for the first time. He reaches for her, anchors himself to her, as he always has.

He tucks a loose strand that’s fallen out of the messy bun she wears, then urges her chin up, up, eager to press his lips to hers, pulling back only to tell her the admission he’s been holding in for – well, for a very long time.  

“Yes, Alex, I – I love you, as well.”   

She starts to back him up against the stove, thinks better of it, and instead twists to press him up against the fridge, dislodging the magnets and business cards and photos that are tacked to the door. They glide across the floor, fanning out in a wave.  

Neither care to be bothered as Alex stands on her tip-toes and loops her arms around Strand’s neck to reach his lips. Slouching down against the fridge, he grins into the kiss, earning a nip at his bottom lip when she catches the amusement sparking in his eyes. He retaliates by slipping his hands down to her ass and lifting her up, giving her no other choice but to wrap her legs around his hips.  

The fridge proves to make that difficult, though. Alex hisses in pain when her ankle slams against the metal door. At the same time, the alarm on his phone goes off, trilling loudly in the kitchen. Not to be left out, the washing machine buzzes down the hallway.  

Alex giggles, giving in to her wheezy laugh as Strand sets her down. He shakes his head at their antics.  

“I feel like if this was one of your bodice-ripper novels, that would have gone to plan.”  

She flaps a hand at him, bending down to start collecting the debris from the fridge.

“If this was one of my books, we’d have already come four times before we made it to the bedroom. There’s a reason those stories are fiction.”  

He hums as he takes the bread out of the oven, thankful he set a timer for it earlier. Alex gives him a look – surprise mixed with heated interest – before she dumps all of the magnets onto the counter and disappears to tend to the laundry.   

Looking back at the beautiful dinner he prepared, Strand contemplates how disappointing it might taste after nuking it in the microwave in a few hours.  

Then he turns on his heel to stride down the hallway, catching Alex around her waist to lift her onto the washing machine, and snapping the accordion doors shut behind them.

“I have a theory I’d like to test about those books of yours,” he tells her as he sinks his hands into her hair, dislodging her bun. A smirk spreads across her face as she tugs at him to stand between her spread thighs.  

He lets her maneuver him where she wants him, caught in her undertow. Reaching down, he peels her shirt off, leaving her in her tank top and bra. Easing the strap down one shoulder, his lips follow it down across the swell of her breasts. His touch stutters along her skin when she lifts her legs to bracket his hips. He inches the tank top upwards, moving slowly – too slowly for Alex, who reaches down and peels the top off. Strand chuckles, his scruff rasping the revealed skin between her breasts.

“Patience is a virtue,” he says, the words rumbling from his chest.

“That’s debatable.” She leans down to drag her lips across his neck, nipping at the skin there just underneath his loosened collar. Changing course, she urges him down. Their lips meet once, then again, before she can reign herself in to let out the joke that’s been riding on the tip of her tongue.

“You said you had a theory to test. I seem to remember some of the scientific method from college.”

Strand shoots her that wry smile, framing her face with his hands as he leans down to meet her for another kiss. “I’ll happily refresh your memory.”

 

\------

 

“Nic thinks I’m being too suspicious that all of the clues seem to lead straight to Duris.”  

Alex picks up a piece of bread as she talks, tearing it into tiny pieces. They fall from her grasp, joining the others on her plate.  

“I’m not one to believe in prophecies, but the idea of him being the focus of that document does hold some weight.” Strand pauses to drink his wine before continuing. “However, you could also say that about any other important figure in history, especially when dealing with the Christian religion.”  

Swirling the wine in his glass, he leans back against the sofa and lets the argument form in his head. Duris did have a hand in Charles Guiteau’s downfall, if the reports from the Oneida community were to be taken seriously. Letters from Luther, Guiteau’s father, to John Noyes showed that the man believed his son was possessed by Satan, and that he believed so due to word he’d received from Duris about Guiteau’s mental state and tendency towards lying about everything. Though the term ‘pathological liar’ wasn’t coined until 1891, Strand believes Guiteau would’ve been a perfect case study for Delbrueck, had Guiteau lived long enough.    

Duris certainly fit the bill for introducing a new religion to another land with his shroud theory. And there was no doubt he ticked the box on the Helvetian man requirement, having been born in Switzerland.  

“The last point, however, is proving to be the most difficult to pin down.”

“Agreed.” Alex blows out a breath, letting her head roll against the cushion. “Why do we have to live on a planet that’s ninety percent water?”

He lets out a soft chuckle at her pout, leaning down to kiss her, hoping to take some of the frustration from her when he retreats. Trailing the backs of his fingers down her cheek, that simple, easy contentment settles in his chest when she presses her lips to his knuckles.  

“I think it’s actually closer to seventy percent. But I may have a theory on where that specific point on earth might be.”

“I don’t know if I’m up for another round of hypotheses.” Alex grins, her eyebrows doing a little wiggle when he snorts at her attempt at humor.

“I’ve got an appointment with an archivist at the Frye tomorrow afternoon– she's an expert in Babylonian antiquities.”

“Is she also an expert in geography?”

“No, but I think that she might be able to help us narrow down our ‘specific place on earth,’ if she can tell us more about that stone Duris acquired.”  

“The one that he traded for and promptly got rid of.”

“Exactly. I feel that warrants another look, since my father wrote about it in his journal.”

“I’ve got an advertising meeting first thing with Nic and Paul, but after that I’m free,” Alex says around a yawn.

“Good, because the only way I could talk her into meeting me on such short notice is because she knows you.”

She lets out a questioning hum, too lazy to bother with words. “Does the name Sasha Peters ring any bells?”

 

\------

 

It does, in fact.

The name sparks a memory of a 2012 Christmas party PNWS hosted for their donors at Smith Tower, in which Alex and Nic had been forced to attend, having been the fresh new faces of the senior production team. While Nic and Amalia got ‘work-appropriate tipsy’ (Nic’s term for consuming as much free booze as possible, while appearing that he hadn’t), Alex stepped out onto the observation deck to cool her flushed cheeks. A noisy cluster of people near the door had her moving away, down the barred corridor to stand at the corner. Thirty-five floors below, the harbor lights glowed bright against the dark water.  

“I’m not allowed to smoke up here.”  

Alex’s drink sloshed in her hand as she jumped, not realizing she was sharing the view with someone else. A woman stepped out from the shadows of the building, a lit cigarette flaring as she took a drag on it – Alex's work-appropriate tipsy brain immediately focusing on the red lips that let out a wispy cloud of smoke.  

“I, uh, wasn’t going to say anything.”

The woman took another step and the deck lights illuminated her; she was possibly the most beautiful woman Alex has ever seen. The thought was probably (most definitely) showing on her face.  

“Oh, you were, once you gathered up the courage to awkwardly flirt. I’m just cutting to the chase so we can do this part.” She extended her hand, golden bangles clinking down her wrist. Unable to do much else, Alex shook it, hoping the sweat on her palms was all in her head. “I’m Sasha.”

Alex went to open her mouth, relieved that she could at least fall back on her manners to keep her afloat, when Sasha cut her off, “–and you’re Alex. I had to stand there and listen to Paul gush about you. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really care. I’m here as a stand-in for my boss. But then he pointed you out. And I became interested.”

Warmth spread through her limbs that had nothing to do with the alcohol she consumed.  

“So you’ve been standing here the whole night, then, waiting for me to come up so you can play the suave, sophisticated lady?”

Sasha flashed her a smile. Alex never really liked the term weak-kneed when she read it in novels, but oh boy, she was a goner. And, although she didn’t know it yet, she would get the same feeling in three years when she saw Richard Strand’s genuine smile for the first time.  

“It worked, didn’t it?”

It did, indeed. Because soon they were leaving the party together, Amalia giving her an exaggerated wink when she dropped by the table to pick up her purse, and heading out to a quieter bar, then to Sasha’s place in Georgetown, then to Sasha’s bed. The sex was fantastic, to no one’s surprise. The next morning, Sasha made her blueberry pancakes and promised to text her when Alex left.

Which she never did. Alex moped about it for two weeks, until accepting it as a one-time thing, and promptly got over it.  

She shares the shortened version of their meeting to Strand on their walk to the Frye the next day. He shoots her a look at her sore attempt at downplaying how average their meeting was. Saved from her fumbling recount, they reach the concrete archway, the art museum’s name stamped across it in black letters.     

Sasha meets them inside, still as gorgeous as ever, her tall frame draped in a red wrap dress. She introduces herself to Strand with a quick handshake, then moves on to Alex, taking her outstretched hand in both of hers.  

“A pleasure to see you again, Alex.”  

“Yeah, you too,” Alex nods, trying to keep her expression blank when Strand pointedly sets a hand on the small of her back.  

 _Men_.

Sasha’s eyes follow the movement and then dart back up to hers, a smirk pulling at her lips. Motioning for them to follow, she takes them through the lobby, down the main staircase, and through the first door on the left marked _Archives_.  

The interior must have missed the museum’s update in the late nineties, given the abundance of faux-wood veneer on the counters, tables, and walls. Looming above them are large, white filing cabinets. Shelves full of binders and books and tapes fill in the gaps between the cabinets.  

Hung here and there are posters, advertising past exhibitions: _#SocialMedium_ ; _The Old, Weird America_ ; _Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult_. On the tables lined throughout the long room are stacks of books and metal boxes, opened to reveal manila folders and loose papers. Seated in a few of the chairs are college students – obvious due to the tired look in their eyes – their backpacks at their feet, MacBooks sitting open on the table before them.  

At the sight of them, one of the students gets up and rushes over, asking Sasha for help. She motions for Alex and Strand to wait as she leads the student away, down between the stacks of bookcases at the far end of the room.  

“Do you know anything about him?” Alex points to the poster for von Keller.  

“He was a German painter. Notably known for his interest in occult experiments and Christian beliefs such as raising the dead and stigmata.” Strand tilts his head a fraction, eyeing the painting that serves as the poster’s backdrop. It’s of a young woman, her short, dark curls pinned back. She’s dressed in a lowcut gown, a red robe draped off her pale shoulders. Her eyes are closed, her head tilted up just slightly, as if she’s waiting to be kissed. “I believe that painting is named _Anticipation_.”  

There’s a glint to his eyes when he looks back in her direction, as if he’s entertaining some private joke.   

“One of his most well-known.” Both of them turn from the poster at Sasha’s voice. “Shall we?”  

She ushers them down a short hallway to her office, which is sparsely decorated with artwork. Alex recognizes a painting of the Ishtar Gate that Strand showed her. The far wall is taken up by a large bookcase and filing cabinets, atop of which are recreations of clay statues and tablets. They take a seat, Alex starting her recorder as Sasha opens up a folder on her desk and turns it to face them.  

The first page is a photo of two small stones, both colored the same burgundy red with two thick white lines running along the interior. Stamped across the photograph is a watermark: _Property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art_.  

“This is your _bêlu papparmīnu_.” Sasha hands the photo over for them to inspect it. “It’s a precious agate stone. The smooth surface was made by slaves, who filled troughs with sand and water and moved the stone back and forth in the mixture. The process would’ve taken several weeks, if not months. Although the translation is rough, it means ‘ruling stone.’ Specifically, a stone with two white bands.”  

Alex traces the white streaks with her fingertip. “But this – there's two stones here.”

“It was broken during the retrieval process, unfortunately.”  

Picking at the corners of the documents still in the folder, Sasha locates another photo and hands it across. Underneath the same watermark, a necklace sits against a black backdrop. Small blue and gold charms in the shape of leaves hang from it. Near the center is a wiry, circular cage made of gold, shaped as if to hold something. “This is the necklace that it was found in. The blue stones you see here are lapis lazuli, which was a very extravagant – and expensive – choice. It was more sought after than gold at the time.”  

“Where was it found?” Strand asks. “The Royal Tombs of Ur?”  

Shaking her head, Sasha pulls another document out: a map printout of a coast, the land pockmarked with smaller lakes farther inland.  

“It seems your hunch was right, Doctor Strand. This was found alongside a body and a few other artifacts in a cave in Baiae, Italy, during a dig led by the University of Cambridge in 1962.”  

“That’s the city you thought Simon was talking about, right?” Alex points out, to which Strand gives a confirming hum.  

“Like I said, the necklace was damaged and the stone was broken. It’s a shame, but it does happen,” Sasha explains.  

“You mentioned this was called a ruling stone – why is that?”  

“We believe the necklace originally came from a tomb in Hillah, Iraq – likely stolen, then traded and sold off until it reached the Mediterranean. Or it arrived with the Babylonians when they fled the decline of their city and made their way west. Either way, it was stored in a cave off the eastern shore of Baiae. This particular stone is quite important, as it matches the description of an object that’s said to have immense power over demons.”  

Alex shares a look with Strand at that.  

“It was supposedly a gift from Pazuzu,” Sasha continues, “the Mesopotamian god of demons of the wind, to the goddess Tiamat to pledge his allegiance. Or to gain favor with her, since she was a primordial being. When the gift fell to earth after her death, it took on the form of a precious stone. It was found during Gilgamesh’s rule, who had a necklace crafted for it to hold the stone. The two white bands here.” Sasha leans across the desk to take the photo back from Alex, dragging the tip of her fingernail where Alex had traced along the white lines. “These are supposed to symbolize gateways, one band letting the demons into this world, and the other sending them back to _Arallu_ , or: the underworld. The legend says that Pazuzu gifted Tiamat this to aide in her attempt to take the throne from her husband Abzu.”  

Because of course it had to be a legendary stone that acted as a door to let demons access the earth – Alex isn’t sure what else she’d been expecting. Strand readjusts in his seat, running his palm across his chin as he frowns at the information.

“But if Babylon fell in 539 BCE, then how did someone store this necklace in the caves? The reports I read stated that the Romans filled the tunnels in around the sixth century.”   

Sasha shrugs, lacing her fingers together atop the desk.  

“According to the notes of the dig, they’re not entirely sure how either. All the entrances they found were sealed off, though that doesn’t explain how the woman they found inside got there, as her state of decomposition and clothing suggested she’d only been in there for no more than two decades. There are possibly one or two entrances that are now lost to the sea, but they’ve never been found on any of the dives. You mentioned in your email that there was a man who claimed to have this stone at one time – but unless he lived during the Middles Ages when the water would’ve been low enough for him to reach one of those passages, I don’t see how that’s possible. I also don’t see why he would then bring the stone back. I’d have to assume he was simply mistaken.”

Strand doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that as he taps the map in his hand against the chair’s arm, lost in thought. He only stops when he remembers the recorder and Alex’s constant threats in the beginning of their partnership about clean audio.  

Sensing that the interview is over, Sasha organizes the file and rounds the desk to hand it off to Alex, leaning in to kiss her goodbye on the cheek. Turning to Strand, she does the same to him, patting his outstretched hand that he holds out for her to shake.  

They both look to Alex, twin expressions of worry on their faces, when she drags in a startled breath and clamps her hand around Sasha’s arm.  

“Is everything–”

“Above your door – that artwork, the maze.” Alex points to the object hanging above the doorframe, of the circular design with five stick figures carved symmetrically between the outer walls of a maze. “Where did you get it?”  

“It’s a _šiqpu_ _kidinuu_ – a protection talisman.”

“Protection from what?” Alex demands.

Sasha shifts to take a step backwards, surprised at the pressing tone. Strand puts a hand on Alex’s back, the touch seeming to reign her in a little as she settles down, glancing between the two of them and the art.   

“Lots of things,” Sasha finally answers. “It’s a type of apotropaic ritual. People would hang it above their doorways to ward off evil spirits, or thieves, or anyone that wished them harm.”  

Realizing she still has a hold of Sasha’s arm, Alex abruptly lets go. “I’m sorry, I just – I've seen it somewhere else.”  

Sasha nods, accepting the apology with a murmur as she leads them out and back up, leaving them to see themselves out through the lobby. They make it down the front steps and onto the sidewalk before Strand opens his mouth to ask.

“It was in Warren’s office, on his desk. It’s the same maze,” Alex explains, beating him to the question. “I thought it was just an odd decoration choice. It didn’t seem important.”

“We know he’s interested in Babylonian artifacts–”

She lets out a snort, walking faster now as she spots his car in the distance. “Yeah, he’s interested in ones that allow you to control demons.”  

Then, just as Strand’s adjusted his gait to match hers (something new for him, when it’s usually her keeping up with his long strides), Alex skids to so sudden of a stop that he can swear the heels of her boots squeal. “What if it could cancel out the stone’s powers?”  

Her dark eyes shine up at him, hope nestled in there amongst the impending worry, and he drags in a breath. On cue, her nose wrinkles up, her eyebrows scrunching down in frustration at his hesitance.  

“Oh, come on, work with me here. I have to think of a plan B.”  

He draws up short at that. “What’s plan A?”  

“I’d think that was fairly obvious,” she tells him, the words rolling out slowly, as if he’ll catch on while she’s talking – which he does.

“No.”  

 _No a million times over_ , he thinks.  

“Yeah,” she replies, her voice so small it’s almost lost under the city’s noise.

“Alex.” He reaches out but she’s already moving away, heading for the car. Eating up the distance she creates, he catches up and tries to reason with her. “That’s too much. You don’t know if you can–”

“No, but I do know what Warren’s after now. And I know where it’s at.”

“You have no evidence that he wants that stone,” he points out. “We only know about it because of Duris – and we don’t even know if it’s the same stone Duris owned, or how he would’ve gotten it into that cave, since it would’ve been inaccessible in the 1800s. There are too many unknown factors – certainly too many to make such a quantifiable leap like that.”

Alex refuses to budge, though.  

“It’s a preventative measure, then. And if we find out he needs me for something else, then oh well, but I have to try something. The stone can’t be any good to him broken, since the Met would’ve had it bought out from under them or stolen already. But you heard what Sasha said, that it has the power to control demons.”

“And you believe a rock can do that?” he barks out a laugh, shaking his head at her. “Alex, that’s–”

“If I draw a particular squiggle against a wall, I can go backwards in time. So, yeah, a special rock isn’t that far out of the realm of possibilities for me.” She crosses her arms, defiance in the set of her jaw, prepared to tell him what’s about to happen when her phone trills in her pocket.  

“Miss Reagan!” Andrew Virk greets her on the other line, sounding as if he’s mainlined a double-shot of espresso. “I apologize for calling on such short notice, but your producer transferred me since you are out of the office.”  

“It’s fine,” she assures him, letting him ramble on for a moment about the studio’s choice in hold music before she can put him back on track. “What was the reason for your call?”

“Oh, right – of course, my apologies.” There’s a shuffling noise in the background as he moves what sounds like a pile of papers straight onto the floor, if his muffled sigh is anything to go by. “I wanted to get in touch with you because I’ve found something in Duris’s last journal. Our conversation piqued my curiosity, so I read through it all again. What I came across was an unusual note, hidden under the back inside cover.”

She pulls the phone away from her ear and turns on the speakerphone, urging Strand closer. “What did the note say?”  

“It’s – well, it’s a request from Duris to Daniel. It reads: ‘Daniel, you have trusted me with your care and now I must trust you with mine. Meet me at the San Carlo Theatre in Napoli on the thirtieth of March, 1873, where Verdi’s _Aida_ is playing. Look for me in the piazza. Bring the attached note where I have written instructions for myself. Know that I would not ask this of you if it were not important. We must travel to the omphalos and hold up the law of the universe. God cannot help us. Only through us will all things hold together. _Lauda finem_.’”

“What is that? Latin?”

“Yes. It means ‘praise to the end.’”  

Alex shivers as a gust of wind blows down the street. She curls her shoulders inward to keep her phone from it so Virk can hear her. Strand moves to stand beside her, his arm brushing her shoulder, shielding her as best as he can.  

“What does the attached note say?” she asks.

“Unfortunately, there isn’t another note. I just – I have to admit that I’m rather confused by it all. Duris must’ve written this sometime before that date in 1873, knowing he’d be at that theatre. Yet, Daniel Guiteau would’ve been too young – perhaps two or three years-old at the time.” Virk lets out a sigh. “He must’ve written this to another Daniel, but I still don’t understand what he’s referring to.”  

She looks up from the phone to find Strand already watching her, a solemn expression on his face. She sucks in a breath and lets it roll out of her.  

“I do.”

Virk makes a strangled noise of surprise. “You do? What on earth does it mean, then?”  

“I’m sorry, I have to go, but thank you for this information. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I can.”  

Ignoring the protests on the other end of the line, she ends the call.   

“You think Duris knew Daniel would find that note when he was old enough, bilocate back to 1873 and the two of them – what, went and placed that stone in a cave in some abandoned town in Italy?” Strand scoffs at the notion. “Why not throw it into the ocean?”  

“Because of what’s inside the cave,” she reminds him as she moves to the passenger side of his car. “You said it yourself that people believed the River Styx ran inside the tunnels. If you want something to disappear for good, I can’t think of a better place to dump something than in a holy river that runs into the underworld, out of humanity’s reach.”

“It clearly didn’t make it down there since it was discovered a century later,” he points out. Making his way over to the driver’s side, he meets her steady gaze across the roof of the car. “You heard what Sasha said, about the body they found of the woman, that she’d only been in there for a few decades.” He swallows. “That’s not going to be you they find.”

Her expression softens at his tone. “No, it won’t be. I promise.”

Strand sighs, shaking his head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do,” she assures him before getting into the car.  

“That’s what scares me,” he murmurs to himself. Something prickles along his skin and he gives the street a cursory sweep before he ducks down into the vehicle. Gripping the steering wheel, he bites back all of the arguments against her plan and simply asks, “All right, where to?”  

“Your house. I don’t know how long it will take.” She glances between him and the dashboard. “I’d like to be somewhere the... other me will be safe. With you.”

“You will be,” he vows, and cuts the wheel to pull out into the street.

They head south, forgoing the freeway and keeping to the side streets. They’re crossing the Duwamish River, Alex’s legs aching from where she’s trying not to bounce them from nerves, when her phone trills again with another incoming call.  

“It’s Nic,” she announces, relief trickling into her tightened limbs at the sight of his familiar mop of hair on the screen. Alex taps to answer and prepares a tone of voice that conveys ‘I’m not making questionable decisions right now’ (though, as her producer and longtime friend, he’s always been able to see through that one).  

“Hey, what’s–”

He doesn’t give her a chance to finish. “Alex, where are you?”

The concern in his voice brings her up short.

“I’m – we just finished our interview at the Frye. We’re heading back to Burien to... grab something from–”

“Turn around.”

A chill sweeps through her. “What? Why?”

She looks to Strand, as if he can answer her questions. His expression tightens at the alarm that must be visible on her face.  

“You need to come to the studio,” Nic demands. “Now. Like, right now.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other chapter titles that were considered: _Mesopotamian Research Dump; My Ancient Civ II Professor Would Be Ashamed How Often I Had to Google Basic History Dates_ , etc.  
> Is Sasha named after a much-loved character from _The Magnus Archives_? Yes. Does she also look like Danai Gurira in my head? Yes.
> 
> Terms / allusions:  
> Anton Delbrueck: the first person to describe pathological lying via medical literature.  
> Verdi's _Aida_ really did premiere at the San Carlo Theatre on March 30, 1873 -- and I possibly included it because the opera itself foreshadows certain events in this story (though that was pure coincidence, since I didn't select the opera until the second draft). ;)  
> "God cannot help us. Only through us will all things hold together" is a reference to Colossians 1:17 ( _He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together._ )


	11. Chapter 11

“Nic, what’s going on?”  

There are two voices in the background, drowning him out for a moment as an intern swears and Terry demands to see the receptionist. “Nic?”

“Listen,” Nic finally responds, his tone tight with unease, “someone left a package on your desk.”

“Did you open it?” Alex asks, knowing the answer and dreading what he’ll say.  

“Yeah, we – look, I came in here to drop off some new ad spots and it was on top of some other files you had and it was... leaking.”    

“Leaking what?” Alex demands to know.  

Strand jerks his gaze from the road to her, but she holds up a hand, stalling his questions – she can’t answer them, anyway, until Nic answers hers. Paul’s voice joins the chorus of others as he asks if someone’s called the police yet. The prickly ball of nerves in her stomach forms sharp points that dig at her insides. “Nic, talk to me.”

He pushes out a breath, blowing out the audio in her ear for a moment. “I just sent you some photos. They should be coming through shortly.”  

There are three answering dings in her ear. Alex changes the call to speakerphone as she brings up the message app. The car fills with the faint, high-pitched voice of the intern, followed by Nic’s placid tone comforting her and urging her out of the room.  

It all fades to a dull, white noise when the images load.  

“Pull over.”  

“Alex, tell me what’s–”

“Goddamn it, Richard, pull over!” Alex hisses before she clamps a hand over her mouth.  

Tears spring to her eyes. The world around them is suddenly too bright, making the nausea that burns in her throat that much more difficult to keep down. Strand slams on the brakes. The tires crunch as he swerves into a gravel lot. Dropping her phone to the floorboard, Alex scrambles out of the car. Walking a few paces, she bends over with her hands on her knees, fighting back the urge to throw up. She pushes her hands through her hair, desperately wanting it off her neck.  

Steady footsteps come across the gravel.  

“Alex, what is this?” Strand is holding her phone, squinting down at the screen as he swipes through the photos.  

The first image is of a cardboard box. It’s small, no more than eight inches in length, sitting on a stack of manila folders. Spreading out from the box’s bottom corner is a dark, rusted stain. The second photo is of a paper taped to the top, where _Consequences_ is written in an elegant, looping script. The third photo is of the inside, where a severed ear sits nestled atop blood-soaked tissue paper, an emperor penguin earring still hooked within the fleshy lobe, spotted with more blood.  

“That’s – the earring, it’s what Doctor Martindale was wearing when I talked to her yesterday.”  

“It might not be hers,” Strand reasons, hovering beside her, watching her carefully. “The earring looks... store-bought. It could be a prank.”

“Then it’s a very convincing one,” she scoffs, clearing her throat when her voice starts to tremble. “But no – I think it’s real. I think Warren wants me to know that I’m looking into things that I shouldn’t be, at the cost of others.”

“If this is real, then she may still be alive,” he tries again, attempting to soothe her as best as he can by keeping his voice low and even. “A severed ear, while terrible, isn’t a death sentence.”  

Martindale’s croaky laugh and questionable fashion taste fill Alex’s mind. She feels a pang of guilt, deep in the center of her chest.    

“I need you back at the studio,” Nic speaks up from the phone. “Please. They’re sending the police over here to collect... everything, and they’ll need to ask you questions.”  

Alex shakes her head, despite the fact he can’t see her, and lets out a bitter chuckle. “And tell them what? That a philanthropist millionaire kidnapped me and whacked the ear off a colleague because I won’t time travel for him?”   

Nic sighs. “Please – just meet me here. We’ll figure all of this out. I promise.”  

After a few moments, she acquiesces, the fight drained out of her. Strand relays to Nic that they’ll be there soon and hangs up, moving to her side to hand her the phone back. She curls a fist around it, leaning into him. He brings his arms around her and rubs short, soothing paths against her back.  

“I’ve got you.” She shivers in his arms and he frowns, tucking her closer to him. “It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

Minutes tick by, with only the occasional car passing on the lonely stretch of road. Strand spends it murmuring platitudes, trying to keep her focus somewhat on him, and not on the piece of a possible dead woman that’s waiting for them across town. It works, and eventually Alex pulls away and wipes at her eyes, nodding when he asks her if she’s ready to go. He leads her back to the car with a comment about his heated seats that gets a half-hearted snort out of her. It’s not much, but it’s enough to let him know that she’s okay enough to entertain his poor attempt at humor.  

Abandoning the plan of keeping to the side streets, he merges onto the highway and heads north. He directs the car through the midday traffic, switching back and forth across the lanes, hoping to cut some time from the drive. In the passenger seat, Alex stares out the side window, chewing at her nails (a habit she’d long ago forced herself to quit). Her phone sits, locked and silent, between them in the cupholder where he’d put it earlier when she wouldn’t stop looking at the photos.  

The rain starts as they pass Harbor Island, its bulky cranes hanging out over the water. The windshield wipers sweep across the glass in measured arcs. Rising up from the horizon ahead are the buildings of the downtown district, darker stacks of gray against the overcast sky. To the right, the muted yellows and reds of the shipping containers form a makeshift wall around the train yard.  

Strand notices her hands start to shake again, sees her wringing them and stuffing them between her thighs to hide the tremors. Tired of biting his tongue, he breaks the silence.  

“What if we just... leave?”

Alex’s brow furrows. “What do you mean?”  

“We don’t go to the studio. We don’t go to the house. You don’t go to twentieth-century Italy. Instead, we find some place and we go there. A place where no one can find us, and we wait for this all to blow over.”

“Richard,” she starts and he’s never hated hearing his given name more than he does right now, in that placating tone of hers. “I don’t think there’s a place on earth we could go that Warren couldn’t follow.”

“I have contacts. Old colleagues all over the world, on every continent. You pick the place and I’ll get us there.” He’s thankful for the need to watch the road, because he can’t stand the look of sad acceptance she wears.  

“That would be the first place he would look. He was obsessed with you for a time, remember. He knows everything about us.”

“Then we go to the airport. We pick the next departing flight, take it wherever it goes, and we go from there.”  

She shifts in her seat, angling towards him. “For how long, then? We just leave our jobs, our responsibilities – what, indefinitely?”

“Until he finds some new way to usher in this supposed apocalypse. I’m sure he has some other asinine back-up plan, some third or fourth fail safe in place.”

There’s no response from her for a few moments. He looks up from the road to catch her eye, to convince her of his plan – but the expression on her face has his gut twisting.  

“Okay,” she agrees, her tone low and even. It makes him feel as if the world is about to fall out from under him. “But it’ll have to be by yourself.”

“No,” he snaps, trying to keep his focus on the car ahead of them. “No, that’s not going to happen. Like I told you before, we’re in this together. I’m not leaving you by yourself to walk into his trap, knowing what he’ll do to you when it doesn’t work.”

“Then you can’t ask me to consider leaving.” Alex puts a hand up to stall him. “I know. I _know_ it will be dangerous, but it may be the answer to all the questions I’ve had with the black tapes, that you’ve had since your childhood.”

“Those answers aren’t worth your life,” he growls.

“They aren’t the only reason. I told you what he said, the threats he made against my family and yours. I can’t risk them. Or you.” She reaches out to grasp his arm, then seems to reconsider as her hand falls, clenched into a small fist between them.  

“You have–” he’s cut off by the sudden ringing of his phone. The unfamiliar area code gives him pause, but he accepts the call on a hunch.  

Alex turns back to watch the lack of scenery pass by, pretending to pay attention to the rain streaking across the window instead of his mumbled answers. Downtown looms ahead as traffic starts to nestle in around them, the tourists slowing down to get poor shots of the buildings through their dirt-caked windshields. A minivan with Utah tags starts to veer off into the other lane, the driver too busy to notice as they hang over the steering wheel to take in the sights. Someone honks, prompting several others to honk – but it works, and Utah moves back into their lane.     

“Yes,” Strand repeats next to her. “Yes. I understand. Okay, goodbye.” He sets the phone back down into the cupholder, his eyes immediately scanning the rearview. “That was Coralee.”

Alex spins in her seat to face him. “What? What did she say?”

“She said we’re being–”

He’s cut off by a black SUV veering into their lane. Strand curses, jerking the wheel to dip into the bus lane to keep out of their path.  

“These fucking tourists,” Alex swears. The surrounding car horns sympathize with her.  

The SUV swerves again. It clips their fender, nudging them back into the bus lane. Tires squeal as their car is forced sideways.  

“Not tourists.” Strand stomps on the gas pedal. They careen forward with a whining scrape of metal-on-metal. The vehicle makes another pass at them and misses, grazing the guardrail.  

Alex twists over the armrest to watch as the SUV rights itself and roars up the bus lane towards them. Terrified that she’ll end up through the back windshield, Strand shoves her back into the seat.

“I assume that sentence was going to end with ‘being followed’?” Alex asks.

His attention solely focused on the road, Strand only gives her an affirming grunt.

Switching back and forth across the three lanes, he tries to create distance between them to get to the next exit – which isn’t until Seneca Street, and is sure to be crowded full of tourists making their way to the piers. If he can get them past the downtown exits, they have a better chance of safety on neighborhood streets, like Queen Anne. Or Fremont, where the studio and at least one police officer will be.  

Spotting the SUV gaining on them in the rearview, he swerves back into the bus lane – which quickly becomes the shoulder as signals urge them to merge left. Horns blare as they continue down.  

Alex lets out a muffled shout as the retaining wall closes in on them. Knowing he only has scant feet left until the shoulder disappears, Strand dips back into the right lane.  

The car beside them speeds up and switches lanes and suddenly the SUV is moving in to sidle up beside them. Alex lets out a whispered string of swears, her gaze darting between the tinted windows, frozen as she waits for the vehicle to make its move.  

But it doesn’t.  

“What’s going on?”  

Strand takes in the cars surrounding them and the realization hits. “They can’t do anything until we get out of this stretch of road.”  

The stretch that’s about to come to an end very shortly as they speed by the Ferris wheel.  

“When we’re safe, you’ll have to tell me how you came to be so good at this,” she jokes, attempting to lighten the mood, her eyes trained on the vehicle.  

Yellow lights flash around them as the tourists switch on their blinkers. The out-of-state plates move in one large wave to the final downtown exit. Alex squirms in her seat.  

Traffic thins.  

Strand guns it, swerving in front of the SUV and then back across, trying to put as many cars between them as possible.  

The Battery Street tunnel looms ahead, drawing closer until they’re swallowed up by it. Headlights flare on behind them as they enter and the SUV disappears.  

“Fuck,” Alex hisses. “I can’t see them anymore.”

Strand glances between the mirrors, trying to find that chrome grille among the sea of headlights. “They’re there.”  

The tunnel curves suddenly, spitting them out back into the world, the concrete walls falling away as they climb back up to street level. They take the first right, tires spinning against the wet road. Parked cars are nothing but metallic blurs as they fly past.  

“Richard.”  

The SUV is back, advancing on them as they speed down the empty street.  

A stop sign appears up ahead at the next intersection. They careen through it, cars on either side braking to avoid them. Horns peel in their wake. Two cars smack together; a bus skids across the slick pavement.

They make it across. As does the SUV, which barely avoids a collision with the bus.  

Strand blows through two smaller intersections before making a left onto Westlake, which will take them up around Lake Union – and through more major intersections.  

“Maybe we should pull over.” At the appalled look he shoots her, Alex elaborates. “We both know who’s driving and we both know who they–”

“No.”  

“Richard–”

The SUV is done tailing them.  

It moves into the southbound lane, gaining on them. An oncoming truck blares its horn, forced onto the sidewalk to avoid a collision as the SUV pays it no mind. Strand weaves in and out of the bus lane to make it around the traffic, keeping just ahead of the other vehicle.   

The light coming up is red. He tightens his grip around the wheel, slowing down enough to search for a way through. Rows of headlights line both sides, spotting his vision as he tries to find an opening.  

Alex screams and his head jerks up, recognition a hot poker to his chest. The brakes grind under them as he skids to a stop, barely avoiding the streetcar.  

It’s only a few seconds, but it’s enough.

The SUV slams into them. Their car sails forward across the wet pavement. Airbags crack against their chests; glass explodes from the back windows as they’re forced up onto the sidewalk. Metal crunches as their car smacks a light pole, jerking to a stop.  

The world goes dim around Strand for several long seconds before it hazily returns. His hand reaches up to his forehead, where he feels blood, tacky and warm on his fingertips.  

His name catches his attention. He watches, dazed, as Alex fights to get his seatbelt off.  

“Alex, what–”

“They’re coming.”  

Over her shoulder, he spots a man and woman making their way towards them from the SUV. Beyond them, several bystanders are attempting to make their way over.  

They all turn and run when the woman pulls out a pistol and shoots out Alex’s still-intact window. Strand tugs her close, shielding her from the glass shards that rain over her.  

“Did you like my present?” It’s the woman, her blonde hair swinging in a ponytail, her face shielded from sight by a Seahawks cap.  

“Fuck you,” Alex growls. Strand shares the sentiment, but before he can voice it, someone switches off the lights again.  

Alex feels the moment when his arms loosen around her and she glances back, worried they’ve done something to him, but it’s only the effects of the accident (which she’s also worried about, but it’s a worry that has to be stowed away for now).  

Tessa stands up and waves her partner over, ordering him to get the door open.  

Backed into a corner, Alex searches the street, hoping someone will come to their rescue. All she can see are headlights glaring back at her, the people inside the cars faceless – they might as well be a million miles away. Sirens begin to filter in under the surrounding hum of engines and horns, but they sound too far away to be of any real help.  

Especially once the man pops open her door.  

“Get out,” Tessa orders.    

“Why don’t you just drug me against my will like last time?”

Perky shoulders shrug underneath the rain jacket. “This is more fun.”

At Alex’s lack of movement, Tessa pulls the gun back out from her pocket and points it at Strand. He seems somewhat aware again, because he makes a half-hearted attempt at pushing Alex down out of its range. Tessa chuckles at the sight and Alex suddenly understands that primal urge to maim and kill. She’d balked at how Sarah Benning could carve off a girl’s face, but right now she wants nothing more than a sharp knife and an hour alone with this woman.

Twisting in the seat, Alex cradles Strand’s cheek, swiping a thumb against the stubble there. His blue eyes widen.  

“You trust me, right?”  

“We don’t have all day,” Tessa taunts.  

Strand reaches for her, shaking his head as he does. “Alex–”

“Trust me.” She drops a kiss to his cheek and moves out of his grasp, wincing her way out of the wreck. She leans against the car once she’s out because the world won’t stop spinning.  

“Good.” Tessa gives her a smile of approval. “That makes it a lot easier to do this.”  

Alex isn’t sure what ‘this’ entails until there’s a hard blow to the back of her skull.  

Stuck inside the car, Strand groggily watches Alex crumple to the pavement. Fighting the pull of unconsciousness, he struggles to free himself of the wreck to get to her, but his door won’t budge.  

The woman bends down into the passenger’s side. From this angle, he can see up underneath the hat she wears. The eyes he remembers, the yellow headlights carving at them, revealing that potent green that sparks in the harsh light. She’s the striking blonde woman from the auction in Brussels.  

A slow smirk stretches across her face as she takes him in. “ _Dobriy den_ , Mister Strand. I heard you were asking about me.”

“It’s Doctor Strand, actually,” he corrects with a grunt, shouldering the door behind him, trying to get out and over to Alex, lest they decide to leave him behind.  

The woman tilts her head, humming as if she’s considering something.  

“As much as I do enjoy playing games, you have nothing to worry about. You didn’t think we were going to leave you here, did you?” she grins, her pretty teeth flashing in the light when he freezes at her words. “Oh, come now, you’re not that special – I’m psychic, too. But don’t worry.” The door behind him opens with a popping whine. “You’re coming with.”  

He’s going to tell her it won’t take much to knock him out, given that he’s straddling the line of unconsciousness, but she won’t listen to him anyway. It's not because he’s psychic that he knows this, just his knowledge of interacting with other people for fifty-odd years.  

No matter, though, because there’s a sharp pain across the back of his head, and it all falls away again.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No allusions to my knowledge, but a thank you to [Molly](https://vivaladeadgirl.tumblr.com/) for the Russian (which translates to good day / good afternoon).


	12. Chapter 12

Someone is poking her shoulder.  

Two fingers, their nails just long enough for her skin to smart when they poke again and again. Alex moves to knock them away, grumbling out a request for them to stop.  

“You’re asleep,” someone says, the words muffled as if they’re speaking through a blanket.  

Four more pokes against her collarbone bring her to full consciousness. She gives in and opens her eyes. Crouched above her is Simon, his hair a wild mess. He’s wearing an I Heart Detroit tee and skinny jeans with oversaturated galaxies printed on them. Behind him, the room is a brilliant white – so blinding at first that she can’t differentiate the floor from the walls. Until she turns her head and sees a table and chairs next to a soda machine. Hanging beside it are framed OSHA posters reminding employees about practicing safe work habits. As he watches her take in the breakroom she’s been dumped in, Simon takes a bite into a pastry and chews.      

“I’m dreaming,” she reasons.  

Simon shakes his head, mumbling around the food, “You’re awake.”  

Alex wants to voice her doubt at that, but he’s helping her sit up and then she’s too busy dealing with the swaying room. Putting her head between her knees, she waits for the nausea in her gut to stop roiling. “Richard – Doctor Strand, do you know where he is?”  

“Four feet to your left.”  

Peeking over her leg, she spots Strand slumped against the floor, a bandage taped on his left temple, his chest moving rhythmically as he breathes. She lets out her own breath of relief. Simon taps her leg twice, catching her attention once more.  

“I don’t have a lot of time, Alex. I was sent here to tell you to think fast and get out.”  

She snorts at that. “I doubt they left the door unlocked.”

“They have a plan.”

“I already know Warren’s plan.”

He shakes his head, already backing away towards his sigil that’s drawn on the opposite wall. “I have to go. I’m supposed to tell you that Doctor Strand will be safe.”

“Wait!” she calls from the floor, reaching out as if she can make him stay. “Whose plan? What plan?”

Simon turns from the wall to face her, his eyes clear for the first time. “You’ve been sleeping – talking in your sleep. You’re awake now. I’m telling you this to warn you, Alex: you have a choice. Stay, and let the night be forever. Or go, and keep the world you know alive.”

She shakes her head, regretting it when pain flares down her neck. “I – I don’t know what any of that means.”  

“You will,” he promises. “Good luck.”  

With that, he sets his palm against the wall and vanishes, the lines of his drawing fading after him.  

Taking stock of her surroundings, Alex fights to make it to a standing position, wobbling as she holds herself up against the wall. The dull pain at the back of her head grows to a full roar, the musical whine in her ears eclipsing all other sounds for a full minute. Adjusting her stance, she inches across the room to the door. It’s locked, of course, which she grumbles about to herself as she makes her way to the soda machine. After some finagling (that she learned back in foster care and used all the way through college), she manages to get a water bottle out from the bottom row. Figuring that she’ll have to take the risk of it being drugged, she takes it with her over to where Strand still lays, sleeping away.  

Sliding back down onto the floor, she maneuvers him into a more comfortable position so his head is resting on her lap. She runs her fingers through his hair and closes her eyes, imagining they’re on the couch at his house, and not in the staff room of some rich asshole that fancies himself the pallbearer of the apocalypse.  

Time inches past. There aren’t any windows, but she can tell because she has to periodically adjust her legs or shift her hips to relieve her aching body. Strand’s breathing changes every so often, deepening in stretches, but he never wakes. She traces nonsensical patterns against his scalp until her fingers cramp. The buzzing of the soda machine is a pleasant white noise, but she avoids the pull of sleep, not wanting to go back under.

A sharp inhale sounds from her lap, rousing her from her brooding session. Following it is a grunted mess of words – most of them unintelligible, but she does catch her name.  

“I’m here,” she assures, dragging her fingers across Strand’s scalp once more. He tries moving, letting out a low growl of pain when he manages to turn onto his back, but his eyes are clear when he looks up at her.  

“Are you all right?”  

“No worse than you are.” She traces a finger across his bandage.  

Tilting his head to take in the room, he freezes with a grunt of pain at the movement, clenching his eyes shut.  

“Where are we?”

“A breakroom.”

“What?”  

“Yeah, I know. I assume we’re inside one of Warren’s many evil lairs he has. Or maybe he rents them, like an Airbnb service for millionaire cult members.”

Strand doesn’t bother responding to that, and instead struggles to sit up beside her.  

“Have you tried the door?”

“Locked.” She hands him the bottle of water, which he raises an eyebrow at, to which she shrugs in return. He takes a few greedy sips before handing it back.  

“Has anyone been by?”

“No, unless you count Simon dropping in. With his usual mumbo-jumbo, of course, talking about how I was talking in my sleep – metaphorically, I guess, but you can never tell with him. He also told me that if I stay, the night will be forever. Or I can go, and keep the world safe.”

“Go where?”

To that, she shrugs. Strand’s eyebrows pinch down as he mouths the words back to himself.

“Isn’t that what Martindale said that document – the one Simon claimed to sneak into your adoption paperwork – translated to? That the night will be forever.”

“When the last of the line, the dark one, rises from sleep to devour the world,” Alex finishes, turning to meet his gaze. “What Simon said was the Horn of Tiamat.”

“I’m not sure we can jump to that conclusion without further–”

She holds up a hand, cutting him off. “Possibly the Horn of Tiamat, then.”

“He’s making connections where there aren’t any. The scope of time is too vast for that kind of claim. There’s no possible way a Sumerian document from the seventh century BCE was referring to this... situation.”  

Alex’s shoulders shake as she huffs out a laugh. “I’m not saying I’m the subject of an ancient prophecy. I just – I thought a lot of things weren’t possible before last week.”  

Strand holds her gaze, his lips thinning as he draws in a ragged breath.  

Whatever he’s about to say next is cut off by the door opening. Standing in the doorway is Warren, his hands tucked casually into his pockets as he grins at the two of them.

“Richard, Alex – I'm glad you could make it.”  He takes in their sour expressions and his smile widens, as if this is a fond moment between friends. “Come on, up and at ‘em. I have something to show the both of you.”

Alex is the first to stand, helping Strand off the floor and wrapping an arm around his waist when he starts to topple over. When they reach the door, Warren waves them ahead.  

The hallway is the same harsh white as the breakroom. The fluorescent lighting gives Strand’s skin a sickly pallor, the bruises painting vivid colors under the bandage and across his cheekbone.  

“It’s nice to see you again, Alex,” Warren says as they pass by an elevator bank and a floor directory. Trying to scan it without being obvious, Alex only manages to figure out that they’re underground, somewhere on level B-3. The escape plan she was concocting in her head loses steam; she’s not sure Strand can make it up three flights of stairs in his condition.  

“The pleasure’s all yours, then,” she bites back, “because I can’t say the same.”  

Behind her, Warren hums as if he’s puzzled by her hostility, but says nothing in return.  

They reach a set of double doors that are opened for them by men in gray scrubs. The room that stretches out before them is cavernous, its metallic panels glinting under the rows and rows of fluorescent bay lights. Twin sets of stairs on either side lead up to an open second floor, where metal catwalks encircle the room. The only activity in the room comes from the raised platform in the center. People in lab coats scurry from table to table, scanning and scribbling as they make whispered remarks to each other.  

Alex pays them no mind, though. The real features are the three machines at the back of the platform. Stamped across the front, no longer hiding next to the serial number on the back, is the same symbol, though the pentagram is surrounded by a solitary circle now.  

Warren steps up beside her, his eyes bright.  

“They’ve come a long way since ‘John,’ haven’t they?” His tone is that of a proud parent, watching their child win the county spelling bee. Alex starts to back away, but he’s too quick, clamping a hand around her arm and pulling her with him onto the platform. Without her support, Strand stumbles, but manages to catch himself and follow the two.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “You have all the money you could ever need. Why would you want something like this? Don’t you realize the consequences of this, of the danger you’d be creating? I’m not sure if you have, but I’ve seen the things that crawl out of the dark – you expect me to believe that a man can control them? They’ll tear you to shreds.”

“Oh, Alex,” Warren sighs, shaking his head. “Humans don’t need an excuse to be terrible. They already are. You’re a journalist, you keep up with the news. I have no need to create monsters. They’re already there.”

“Clearly.”  

He shifts to face her, moving in as she leans away, and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, grinning when she smacks his hand away. Glancing over her shoulder, he takes in Strand – and the fist that’s curled against his side.  

“I won’t lie, I am sorry that you don’t yet seem to understand, Alex. I’m following the path that was laid out for me when I was young. This was always a part of the plan.” He pulls a phone from inside his suit jacket and taps away at it. “Do you know what I bought when I was twenty-six? A plot of land, right on the corner of Union and 6th Avenue. Right where we’re standing, actually.”  

From his phone, Alex’s voicemail message plays, her voice cheery as she promises to return the call as soon as possible. Then:  

“ _Hi, Alex, this is Doctor Martindale – after we spoke, I realized that I never sent you over those numbers, the ones at the bottom of that document, the – oh, you know, the one with the poem. Anyway, the numbers are as follows: four, seven, three, six, three, six, one, one, two, two, one, nine, five, nine, seven. I’m hoping you can ascertain the meaning of them. Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions!_ ”  

“Map coordinates,” Strand speaks up.  

“To this exact spot, yes!” Warren grins, nearly bouncing on his heels. “Don’t you see? It’s been written all along.”

“You found the Horn of Tiamat before,” Alex insists.

“No, no, you see – She came to me in a dream. Tiamat. She told me that my fate was written. And when I awoke, there were numbers – these numbers -- scratched into my arm. And I knew, as Conrad wrote, that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” He takes another step and Alex’s back hits the platform’s railing. “Our fates are written, no matter how we try to act like they aren’t. You would’ve been taught the same, had your mother respected her role. You would’ve been taken care of, had she followed our directions and had we not lost you.”

A cold shock settles in her stomach. “What are you talking about?”  

“It’s a shame.” His frown deepens, remorse flickering in his cool eyes. “We would’ve protected you. The door would’ve been opened long ago, if she hadn’t rebelled. But some cannot handle their responsibilities.”     

“You’re saying that – what, Catherine Chen was one of the Watchers?”

“A Pilori, yes. Or she was, until she betrayed us.”

Alex shakes her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Her journal, the letters she left – she didn’t want me to bilocate. She called it a curse.”

His lips curl together, as if he’s holding in a juicy secret.  

“In her defense, she believed we were an advocacy group for unwanted children with... special gifts. She contacted us, hoping we could take you in, even arranging for us to come get you up in Canada,” he explains. “But then she never showed. And, now, years later – we know that she went back on her word and gave you over to the state instead.”

She thinks of that empty stretch of road, of the glaring headlights, of the men as they chased her through the woods. Of before all that, when Catherine promised her that someone would be by soon.

“She didn’t.” Alex lifts her chin, standing tall as she corrects him. “I did.”

Warren’s eyebrows pinch down, his mouth opening to ask, but then his eyes widen, sparkling with the sudden realization. “Oh. It was _you_. The woman in the woods.”

He seizes her hand, gripping tighter when she tries to pull away. Strand steps up from his place on the stairs, demanding he let her go, when one of the men in gray scrubs grabs hold of him. Taking a marker out of his pocket, Warren slips it between her fingers, urging her to take it.  

He calls out for Tessa, who enters through the double doors. “She will go with you, to protect you.”

Alex wants to laugh at that, but her nerves won’t let her. All the fight drains out of her as Tessa approaches.   

“I’ve – no, I’ve never – I've never gone that far back, or taken someone with me.”  

“It’ll be fun,” Tessa assures her, circling around to grab her other arm. They urge her forward, to the clear space in the middle of the platform.  

Alex glances back, catching Strand’s frightened gaze as another guard grabs his other side and holds him still.  

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

At that, Warren smirks, as if they’re sharing a private joke.  

“You’re not that good of a liar. You know exactly where – and when – to go. And,” he continues in a low tone, “you know what will happen if you don’t.”

She keeps her eyes fixed on him, not daring to look back. “Okay,” she agrees, bending down to draw her sigil against the floor.  

“So you don’t get any grand ideas.” Tessa snatches the marker from her once she’s done, her fingers clenching around Alex’s wrist.  

If she’s expecting any more fanfare, it doesn’t come.  

Putting her hand against the drawing, the room around them falls away, replaced with the hot, stifling air of a rocky passageway. A hundred feet behind them, daylight shines through a vertical crack. The curving lines of her sigil dig into the limestone. The tide churns against the entrance, knocking at it with its spray, the noise echoing down the tunnel. Water slips in along the cave floor, though where they stand seems to be only slightly damp, Alex’s boots making thin impressions in the gritty sand.  

Next to her, Tessa groans and presses her face against the rock.  

“You shouldn’t have come with me.” Pleased for once that she has the upper-hand, all Alex feels is a dull headache (minus all of the aches from the car accident).  

A world away, she can hear Strand and Warren arguing in low tones, can feel the cold metal on her back as she collapses onto the platform. Warren is peppering her with questions, wanting her to relay what’s going on, but her passive self remains mute.  

Pushing off the wall, Tessa shakes her head. “I’m here to make sure that we get exactly what we need.” Seemingly satisfied that she’s not going to vomit, she pulls a flashlight from her pocket and begins walking.  

Ahead of them, the passage continues its downward slope, the damp walls shiny and slick under the flashlight’s beam. “Thank god you didn’t bring us here at high tide.”  

Alex gives the daylight behind them a last glance and turns to follow.

 

\------

 

Her feet hurt. A hundred times now she’s wished that she hadn’t worn boots, and instead opted for her dirty sneakers instead. But she hadn’t wanted to wear them to the museum (and hadn’t wanted to look like the typical rundown journalist when seeing Sasha again), so she can only curse herself for being so concerned about her appearance.  

The rest of her hurts, too, in varying degrees. Eventually, her muscles grew tired of their dull throbbing and moved on to pinching and stabbing at her.  

She’s not the only one suffering, though. As time has crept on, Tessa’s symptoms of the temporal change grew worse. From some base, animalistic part of her, Alex can’t help the pleasure that spikes through her when Tessa groans in pain or stifles back her nausea. She refuses to rest, though, and only makes Alex’s headache worse when she shouts at Alex for attempting to.  

At least Warren seems to have left her alone. The only thing she can sense through the connection is the feel of arms around her back and the faint scent of a familiar cologne. Every so often, Strand will whisper soothing words into her ear. It’s so strong across the connection that it’s like he’s here with her, trapped in this darkness.  

And it is dark, a black so thick that she could almost curl her fingers around it. It’s like being back in that tunnel underneath Prestwick, except now the walls are so close that both of her shoulders brush them. Clouds of sulfur seem to hover in patches, the smell so sharp that it stings, until they pass through and the stagnant air of the cave returns.   

The flashlight, for all the good it does, also does its own damage, playing tricks as Tessa sweeps it up and down the tight passage. Bulges in the rock look like heads poking out up ahead. Their scuffling against the rocky ground creates small echoes like voices, rising up out of the dark ahead, taunting them closer. They remind her of the hundreds of EVP recordings she’s heard, the words too difficult to make out, but the intent and volume enough to get the message across. And sometimes, when they stop to figure a way through a tight squeeze, the sounds continue.

“I’m not seeing any necklaces, Lara Croft,” Tessa sneers.  

“This is the cave.” _Bitch_ , she mentally tacks on at the end.

Tessa whirls, knocking her up against the wall. The flashlight blinds her for a moment, spots marring her vision, as she holds up her hands to stop Tessa’s approach.  

“I don’t appreciate the attitude,” she hisses. “If it isn’t the right one, when we do go back, I’ll let Thomas know just how well you followed his orders. And then we’ll do this all over again until you get it right, or I’ll slit your boyfriend from ear to ear.”  

Alex shoves her away, satisfied when her back smacks the wall opposite. The flashlight falls to the ground. In the arc of light ahead is a wall of crumbled stones where the cave walls fell in. A carving in the rocks catches her attention.  

Chiseled into one of the larger stones is a sigil: a falcon with its wings outstretched, its talons gripping a goat’s severed head. Picking the flashlight up, she steps over to the design and traces the gouges of the talons.  

Tessa perks up at the sight of it. “Can we use that door?”  

“No.” Alex shakes her head as she lays her palm flat against the image. “This wasn’t drawn by someone who can bilocate. There’s no... energy to it.”

Tessa glares at the image. Alex wonders if she’s going to try to correct her, as if she’s knows better on the subject, but instead she nods, her face hardening.  

“It’s back there – the stone.” Fishing the marker out, she hands it over to Alex. “Take us inside.”  

The chamber they step into is spacious – a far cry from the mere two-foot wide passage before. Particles in the rock sparkle like fine glass as Alex scans the flashlight across the room. In the center, pouring down from a hole in the rock above, is a deluge of water that disappears into a small crevice. Passing her hand through the water and bringing it up to her nose, she’s surprised to find it fresh.

On the other side of the wall, the other Alex shivers at the inky black of the cave. She curls up against the rock between them and presses her ear to it, as if she can listen through the mark and let their voices comfort her. The other Alex, the one far away in the future, moans in pain at the discomfort of experiencing another self.

They all put a hand to their nose, stemming the flow of blood.

“Bring that light over here,” Tessa demands, dragging Alex’s attention away from the others. Near the front of the room, a natural ledge in the rock holds a leather-bound journal. The page edges are curled and yellowed, but the text written across the pages is still visible.  

“’You have entered a place of immense evil,’” Alex reads, skimming across the words with her finger. “’Nothing awaits you but certain death. In this room lies the entrance to the underworld, to the land where Hades dwells. Leave, traveler, and know peace.’” At the bottom is a signature, the words _lauda finem_ visible through the mildew stains.  

“What’s that there?”

“’Praise to the end,’” Alex translates as she flips through the other pages.  

“Could’ve been a little more obvious they were hiding something,” Tessa mutters.  

Alex ignores her. Tucked between two pages near the back is a loose paper with the same writing, though far less legible. She can make out instructions, though, and a crude map of the cave’s location.  

Snatching the flashlight from her hands, Tessa reads over the paper, growling when it tells them nothing useful. Bending down, she roots around under the ledge, searching through the loose rocks there, swearing under her breath.  

Drawn back to the waterfall, Alex leans down to inspect the crevice where the water disappears. Nestled down below the larger rocks are a few loose stones, dry save for a few spots where the mist has gotten to them.  

Moving the stones aside, the weak light from the flashlight flashes against a golden charm.  

Wedged between the dry stones sits the necklace.  

Alex pulls it from its hiding place, cradling the center stone when it rattles in its cage of gold. She traces the two white bands that cross the stone, drawing breath when her fingers tingle, much the same as they do when she puts her hand to her sigils. She’d been hoping that they’d find the stone and it would be a dud, just an extravagant piece of jewelry that the texts lied about. But now that she’s touched it, she knows it must be true. The frisson of energy when she touched it told her that much, even with her limited abilities.  

She’s so entranced by the sensation that she doesn’t notice Tessa approaching until she grabs for the necklace. Alex jumps, clutching the stone to her chest, and stumbles until her back hits the chamber wall.  

“Let me have it,” Tessa demands.  

Alex shakes her head, shutting her eyes against the light when Tessa shines it in her face. She listens as Tessa takes another step, feels her crowding her against the wall. Curling her shoulders down, she shields the necklace as best as she can.  

If she loses the stone, Alex doesn’t have a bargaining chip when they go back, nothing to trade for their lives.  

A hand wraps around her throat and clenches, squeezing the air from her windpipe. She thrashes, jerking her head backward to get out of the grip, but there’s nowhere to go. She tries to kick out, but Tessa is too close to do enough damage.  

“Listen to me,” Tessa purrs, her grip tightening, smiling down at Alex as she gasps for air. “I’m going to have that necklace and then we’re going to go back. Now, it all comes down to what you’d like to happen after that. If you hand it over nicely, I’ll let you see your boyfriend, say your goodbyes and what not, before I put a bullet between your eyes – it'll be quick and painless, the same treatment I gave that professor of yours.”

Black spots warp Alex’s vision. She lashes out with her nails, going for the eyes, but Tessa avoids the weak attack, laughing as she does.  

“I’m sure by now you’ve realized that once you finish this, we won’t need you anymore. Maybe I’ll ask Thomas to send you off for an evaluation, where you can babble about time travel and demons. A shrink would have a field day with you,” she grins, her teeth sharp and white in the dim light. “Because that’s what you’ve been afraid of, right? Being locked up for thinking all of this is real. Don’t bother lying – we read all about it in your sleep doctor’s files.”  

Pressure builds up in her skull, as if someone is pouring it full of concrete. The shadows in her periphery grow inward, eclipsing her vision. A world away, Strand is running frantic hands over the other Alex, begging to know what’s happening, demanding she come back as she chokes, writhing on the floor.  

Abruptly, Tessa loosens her grip. Alex slumps against the wall, managing to swallow some oxygen down before her body is wracked by a coughing fit.  

She bends down and grabs Alex’s chin, grinding her cheek against the rock. “Do you want to hear my favorite plan, though?”  

“No,” Alex croaks out before throwing out an elbow, catching Tessa against her ribcage.  

Tessa lurches, tripping over the uneven floor, and tumbles back onto her ass. The sound of bone meeting rock echoes through the chamber as her head bounces off the ground. The flashlight drops down beside her, but Alex can’t risk going for it. She uses the few seconds she has to stumble over to her sigil.  

Glancing back, she watches Tessa’s eyes widen with fear as she claws at the ground, struggling to get up. Alex wants to say a cool line, something about payback, or something about how not to worry, that someone will be back in twenty years for her, but her brain is too scrambled.  

Instead, she lets Tessa’s scream fill the silence as she puts a hand to the rock, and leaves her behind.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went through the transcripts and went through the BTM Resources but could not for the life of me figure out exactly what symbol is on the machines (since there's three or so different symbols, and they don't seem to clarify which symbol it is). So, it's the pentragram in the double circle in my story.  
> And, completely unrelated, but I envy Simon's vast taste in wardrobe choices. 
> 
> Terms / allusions:  
> "It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice" - Joseph Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pre-chapter warning for body horror and violence.

 

It’s a long, dark walk back to the cave’s entrance.

The necklace is a warm weight in her hand, the muscles cramping from how tightly she clutches the stone. Time is hard to calculate, being as dark as it is and her body aching for rest, but it’s been at least two hours of stumbling until she sees the first hint of moonlight. The tide is high now, but the sound of it splashing underneath her boots is a welcome one. Pushing forward, the water knocks up against her calves as she searches for her sigil in the weak light, the stone rough against her palm.  

There’s that familiar buzz in her wrist and then she’s blinking against the harsh lights of the lab. Strand’s face comes into view as he helps her sit up, clutching her to him. He reaches down to trace the bruises on her neck.  

“Welcome back!” Warren greets as he jogs up the platform, crouching down on her other side. He runs a clinical eye over her injuries, smirking when she leans away from his curious touch, before he glances around the empty platform. “I see Tessa didn’t make the return trip.”

Alex forgoes a response, instead glaring at him as he holds out his hand and wiggles his fingers.  

“Hand it over, then.”  

She holds the necklace against her chest and shakes her head.

“You have to promise me something first. I hand you this and you let us go.” She holds her breath. Warren tips his head from side to side, as if rolling the idea around. Then he breaks into another grin. Her stomach plummets, knowing the answer.  

“I’m afraid I still need you for one more favor,” he admits, rolling his lips inward as if in apology.  

“Then let Richard go.”

“No, absolutely not–” She silences Strand with a hand to his chest.

“I’ll stay and do this last thing for you, but you have to let him go first.”  

“I’m not leaving you,” Strand hisses, his arms tightening around her.  

“Sorry to be the one to tell you this,” Warren tells her with a grimace, “but you’re not very good at negotiating. Especially when you have nothing to negotiate with.”  

Lashing out, he crooks his fingers around the necklace and yanks. Alex tugs it back on reflex. The wire holding it together snaps at the tension, sending blue and gold charms scattering across the platform.  

Warren clambers to his feet. Unfolding his hand to reveal the stone, he plucks it out of its cage and drops the rest of the jewelry the floor, as if he were picking lint off a jacket.   

“Beautiful,” he murmurs as he turns the stone in his hand. Light catches the smooth surface, making it glow, as if it were a flame plucked from the fire and polished to a shine.  

Stepping back, he motions to one of the technicians, who opens the front panel of the center machine. Warren sets the stone in a small notch, from which dozens of wires spill out to wrap around the machine’s interior. The technician flips a switch. The machine hums to life, hissing as the components inside whirr. They step back as the panel closes and locks.  

Strand helps Alex up, urging her forward to get as far as they can from the machine.

“But the stone – Richard, we have to–”

“The only thing we have to do is get out of here,” he tells her as they rush across the platform.   

“Brothers!” Warren shouts.  

Above them, a door opens. Men in gray robes spill out, lining the catwalk. Two doors open on either side of the first floor to reveal more robed men, their faces shaded by their hoods as they file in to surround the platform. There must be a hundred, possibly more. They form a tight circle, barring Strand and Alex from escaping the platform.  

“Let us through!” Strand demands, shoving one of the men. A robed man grabs his arm, another quickly stepping up to grab his other side. Alex orders them to let him go as two more seize her. The men ignore their threats and turn the both of them back toward the platform, forcing them to watch.  

The machine rattles as it screeches. Yellow lights pulse along its front. Far above, the fluorescent lights join in with the noise, buzzing as they sway back and forth. The smell of hot tar and rot fills the room, so thick that several of the technicians spread throughout the room start to gag, and Alex feels she’ll be joining them soon.  

The robed men seem to be unaffected. This close, she can see under some of their hoods. Each of them gazes up in awe, their expressions of glee making her gut twist more than the acrid scent.  

With a fading whine, the machine settles and the panel releases. In the winking lights, the stone appears several shades darker, though the two stripes circling it now glow a brilliant white. Stepping forward, Warren plucks the stone from its hold and grips it tight. The pit of worry in Alex’s stomach widens as a grin spreads across his face. One of the men behind her starts to shake, his fingernails digging into her skin as he breathes out in exhalation.  

Spinning on his heel, Warren turns to them and holds out his hand, uncurling his fist to reveal the stone. Faint murmurs of praise rush through the crowd. Alex shares a glance with Strand, comforted that she’s not the only one scared shitless.  

Warren speaks to the men in a foreign language, the words short and cutting. It sounds similar to Hebrew, but the consonants are too harsh, as if he’s tearing them apart with his teeth. None of them sound familiar. Not until he stares directly at the stone and calls out a familiar name, as if coaxing a child in from the rain.  

“Azag,” he repeats, followed by another unintelligible phrase. “Azag, _elû_! _W_ _arû_ _,_ _lamādu_ _._ _M_ _agana_ , Azag!”  

The white bands on the stone pulse three times before something starts to seep out. The dark ooze drips down between Warren’s fingers, pooling on the floor until a shape forms out of the liquid. Its skin is charred, flaring red in patches along its body. Long, thin fingers spread out across the floor as it pushes up, rising to stand on its sticklike limbs. The head swivels back to face the crowd before it. It has no eyes, though Alex senses that it doesn’t need any to see them. At the top of its skull is a gaping mouth with black, snaking tendrils that squirm faster as it jerks its head back and forth. The fingers clink against the metal stairs as it crouches.  

It pounces. Landing on top of one of the robed men, it crushes him to the floor. The man starts to speak, but the creature gives him no chance as it climbs into his open mouth, its limbs cracking as it contorts to crawl inside. Choking as he struggles to his knees, the man clutches his throat, wheezing around the intrusion.  

Fear sparks in his eyes for an instant.  

Then his arms jerk hard to the right as he snaps his own neck, the crunching pop echoing like a gunshot. Alex cries out in horror, trying to get away, but the men continue their steadfast hold on her. Murmurs of praise float through the crowd.   

The creature crawls back out and rushes over to the wall, its body rippling like smoke as it scurries up the catwalk’s supports. It grasps one of the technician’s coats, pulling until the man collapses face-first onto the walkway. Rearing back its hand, the fingers sharpen to fine points and plunge through the metal into the man’s stomach, violently tearing upward, rending his flesh apart like a ruined seam. A sluice of blood gushes over the railing as an animalistic scream erupts from the man. His cries fall silent as he loses consciousness, his blood pattering to the floor below.  

Around them, the men cheer as if in celebration, their hands raised high in praise.

Strand uses the distraction to tear himself free. Turning, he punches one of the men holding Alex, and she uses her newfound freedom to twist free of her other captor. Strand tucks her under his arm and they push through the robed bodies, ducking low to avoid their grasps.     

They break through the men and sprint across the room, closing in on the double doors. Strand urges her on, his feet pounding behind hers.

“Azag!” Warren shouts.  

There’s a sickening sound of splitting flesh from above and then the severed man is there, dropping down from the catwalk to guard the doors. They skid to a stop, eyes wide with horror at the sight of him. Strand pulls her behind him, keeping her back with his arm.  

The man’s eyes are a solid white, his tongue lolling out of his bloodied mouth, swinging as he lumbers towards them. Blood and viscera spill from the tear in his abdomen, drenching the floor.  

Something ripples across the crown of his head. It’s the only warning they have before his skull splits in two with a sharp, cracking sound. Brain matter bursts from the ruined skull as the creature’s tendrils snake up through the cavity.  

The adrenaline coursing through her veins is the only thing keeping Alex from passing out at the sight, her own brain demanding she stay conscious if she wants to live.  

The man sways towards them. She clutches at Strand’s arm as they continue backing up.  

And step right into the awaiting group of robed men, who force them apart and drag them back to the platform.

Smirking down at them, Warren holds the stone out once more and calls out the demon’s name. The man’s body collapses in a bloodied heap as the creature squirms out of the torn skull. It crawls across the room and back into the stone, which flashes once before returning to normal.  

“What the fuck is wrong with you!?” Alex shouts, trying in vain to tear out of her captors’ grips. Easing down the steps, Warren comes to stop in front of her and holds the stone out, as if offering a gift.  

“Touch it.”

“Fuck you,” she spits back, her hands curling into fists.  

He glances up at the men holding her. “Give me her hand.”

Alex keeps her elbows locked tight, rolling her shoulders and thrashing in their hold, but she’s no match in her weakened state. Several feet away, Strand is yelling something, but she can’t hear it over the dull roar in her ears as panic carves a home inside her. One of the men bends her fingers back, revealing her open palm. She shakes her head, the rest of her body following suit, as Warren sets the stone upon her skin.  

The energy she felt before in the cave is multiplied tenfold. A surge of raw heat dances up the tendons of her wrist and up into her arms. Her chest tightens as the energy soaks deep into her marrow, as if her entire body has withstood a hundred bolts of lightning.  

Behind that energy is something dark, though. The stone seems to radiate that sense of dread when looking down a dim hallway and knowing something lurks there in the shadows, waiting for it to move. It’s a feeling she knows all too well, having spent many sleepless nights ignoring the figures watching her from the corner of her bedroom.  

“You can feel it, can’t you?” Warren gazes down at her, his eyes shining with a sickly gleam. “I knew you could. It’s in your blood.”  

He takes the stone from her hand. Alex sucks in a deep breath, feeling as if a weight has been lifted from her.  

He moves down the line of men to where Strand is being held. Instead of offering him the stone, he reaches out and places a hand on his shoulder, smirking when Strand tries to knock him off.  

“Your father would be proud of you, that you’re here to see this first-hand. He would’ve wanted you to play a larger role, but that’s already been cast, I’m afraid.” Warren pats him twice on the shoulder, a laugh riding on the end of his sigh as Strand snarls something back at him. “Oh, I think it’s too little too late for that.”  

Backing away, he returns to his position atop the platform and motions to the two men holding Alex. They bring her up the stairs, simply lifting her off the ground when she tries to plant her boots against the floor to stall them. Setting her down beside Warren, they return to the top of the stairs, where several more men join them, forming a barrier. Strand is brought up to watch from his place on the stairs.  

Snaking his arm around her shoulders, Warren pulls a marker from his pocket and offers it to Alex.  

She shakes her head, refusing it.

“I can’t go again. I’m not strong enough for three times in one day.”

Seemingly unconcerned, he waves one of the technicians over to start the machine again.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere. I only need you to open a door.”  

The realization slams into her. Panic races up her spine, as if she’s stepped off the side of a building and is watching the ground rise up to meet her. Shaking her head again, she struggles to get out of his grip, but Warren holds her fast against him. “Draw it.”

“No!” she shouts, throwing an elbow into his side and slipping from his grasp. Moving backwards to the machine, she tries to create distance between them. Eyeballing the railing, she feels confident that she could hop it.  

But she can’t leave without Strand.  

Her gaze darts around, looking for a sufficient weapon, while Warren emits a soft chuckle at her antics. He brings the stone to his lips, whispering a name, the syllables making his mouth move in a distinct way – one that rare books dealer Gloria Cohen would be proud of. In response to his call, one of the white bands flashes and a gray mist escapes, snaking around the workstations and machines to disappear behind her.  

Every hair stands on end as it forms, its body clicking as it moves. She keeps still, her eyes locked onto Strand as his eyes travel up above her, fear paling his features. A wash of sour breath brushes her neck. Something thin and sharp traces down her spine, as if it’s touching her bare skin through her coat.  

“AAaaleex.” It speaks her name, that same high-low tone she heard before, back in the forest in Idaho. As if reading her thoughts, it leans in close, her hair fluttering as it drags in a breath. Then it whistles, the drawn-out notes so close they pierce at her eardrum.   

“There’s no point in running,” Warren tells her, sighing as if he’s merely annoyed by her attempt to get away. “There are other ways to get you to cooperate.”  

There’s a soft clinking behind her. The sound is so visceral that the memory floats up unbidden: she’s sitting on the swim deck of the Humphrey’s house boat, having fled there when her dad walked in on Sloane and her kissing. There’s a set of wooden wind chimes hanging from the railing above, just over her dad’s shoulder where he sits beside her. They clink together again as a warm breeze blows off the water. His legs dangle into the water; she kicks hers, churning up bubbles that tickle at her skin.

“Bug,” Pat sighs, and Alex can hear it in the memory and behind her all at once. “Love is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I don’t _love_ her,” she protests, frowning at the way her cheeks start to burn.  

“Well, you don’t have to love someone to want to... be with them.”

“Dad, please _please_ do not give me that talk again.”  

He chuckles at her, the comforting sound of that familiar, wheezing laugh easing the tension she feels.  

“Oh, no, this isn’t that kind of talk. You’re a smart girl, I know you remember what we told you from that one. No, this is different. And it’ll be short, I promise. It’s only a sentence, really. You are a human being who, as the result of millions of years of evolution and growth, has the ability and the right to want, to need, to be with, and to love whoever you damn well please. Some people will try to tell you different, but those people are wrong. And mostly assholes.”  

Pat tips his head to the side, grinning at her. “Besides, it would be an insult, really, to all the hard work of those monkeys we came from if you didn’t kiss the Humphrey’s girl. Especially when you two have been eyeing each other across the dinner table the whole summer.”  

Alex groans and rolls her eyes, biting back at the smile that wants to form.

“That was more than a sentence. And we have not been ‘eyeing each other.’”

“Uh, well, yeah, I guess you two have moved one from just looking.”     

“Oh, my god.”  

He barks out a laugh as she covers her face, slinging an arm around her shoulders and tucking her close.  

“I love you, Bug.” It’s his voice again, but it’s wrong.  

It’s here, and it shouldn’t be.  

Her eyes snap open, her lips trembling as the smell of suntan lotion and Old Spice surrounds her. His hand drops down onto her shoulder. She looks down at it, studying the wrinkles and the callouses and the wedding band. The one that was left on when he was cremated.  

Alex squints at the hand, overwhelmed by how wrong it is, sitting there on her shoulder.

Her dad’s hand disappears. The hand that replaces it is a decayed, tangled mess of mottled bones, strung together with strips of rotten meat and crusted ligaments. The long fingers hang over her shoulder, the sharp tips pricking at her skin through her clothes. Blood wells up from the wounds and drips down her chest.  

Alex swallows back a cry of pain as the nails drive deeper. Warren approaches, tilting his head as he watches her struggle.  

“I know how frightened you are of being possessed. It’s why you went to that cabin all by yourself during your... sabbatical. Because if you really were, then when it happened... there would be no one around to hurt.”   

He brings the stone up and speaks to it. Alex gasps as the hand jerks from her body, tearing up through her flesh. She puts her hand against the wounds to stem the bleeding. The dark mist circles once around her ankles before disappearing into the stone.  

Warren reaches out, grabbing her hand and pulling it away.  

Her palm comes away clean. A quick glance at her shirt reveals the same; there’s no blood, but she can still feel the throbbing of the wounds.  

Bringing the marker up, he shakes it back and forth at her like a toy. “Are you ready to open the door now?”  

Hatred thrums through her, the age-old tempo beating with her heart. She trembles with it as she glares up at him – because how dare he use the memory of her dad like that to manipulate her, to trick her into giving in to the demon doing his bidding.  

“No.”  

Warren strikes, wrapping a hand around her throat and squeezing, his thumb driving against her airway. The playful smirk is gone, the mask wiped away by a scowl that reveals the true man underneath.  

Alex claws at his hand, desperate for oxygen. She can hear Strand yelling for her, can hear the muffled exclamations of the monks, can hear the pounding of footsteps against the metal platform.  

Suddenly, Warren is torn away from her, tackled to the floor by Strand. Alex sinks to her knees, sucking in greedy breaths. Fisting a hand around his collar, Strand lifts Warren off the platform enough to drive his other fist across the man’s face. He drops him, letting Warren’s body slam onto the platform.  

“Don’t touch her again.” With that, Strand races over to her, shoving the curtain of her hair aside to examine her injuries. “Are you all right?” he demands to know, letting out a breath of relief when she nods.  

The monks crowd in further, restless as they wait for Warren’s signal.  

“I’ve been going about this the wrong way, it seems.” He sneers at the two of them as struggles to his feet. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth, dripping down onto his pristine shirt as he closes in.  

“Stay away from her.” Strand tucks her against him, wary as he watches Warren pull the stone from his pocket.  

“I’ve been ignoring the greatest irony of all, Alex,” he continues, ignoring Strand. “Can’t you see how funny it would be, for the esteemed enigmatic himself to become a black tape? To become the one thing he can’t explain?” Crouching in front of them, he lets out a delighted laugh at their expressions, knowing he’s hit a nerve at the panic that shines through Alex’s glare. “You have no idea the things I can do to him. What I can make him do while you watch.” He tilts his head, rolling his lips together in thought. “I think I’ll have him dig those cool, blue eyes of his out. Maybe have him carve off his own face and stitch it back on. How does that sound?”

Alex shakes her head, trying to shove Strand behind her, as if she can shield him from Warren’s threats.

“Leave him out of this. Stop–”

“Oh, he won’t be able to stop,” he persists. “He’ll want to, and he’ll plead for you to make him stop, but he won’t. All because of you.”

“Alex, don’t listen–”

“Don’t worry, though,” Warren cuts him off, leaning in closer, making sure her full attention is on him. “We’ll get it all on tape for you. Then you can share the audio of his final moments with your audience. That’ll get them to leave a review, huh?”   

Rearing up, she snatches the marker from his grasp. She ignores Strand’s protests and begins to draw. The marker squeals as she jerks it across the floor, the black ink almost melting into the gray metal. She encircles it once, preparing to draw a second circle when Warren takes the marker from her hand. “Ah, ah – no need for that.”

Alex glares up at him. “If something goes wrong, I need–”

He waves away her concern. “Nothing will go wrong. Now, open it.”

Placing her hand on top of the sigil, she feels the bite of energy as it passes through her, warning her not to continue. Knocks pound against the other side of the door, vibrating under her palm. They call out through the veil, a thousand voices begging to be let out. Alex swallows, her throat going dry at the sound.  

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he warns. “I watched you send one back.” At the twin looks of alarm from Alex and Strand, a grin breaks across his face, fresh blood dribbling out of his mouth at the movement. “Oh, Alex, you’re smarter than this. Of course I had to test your ability, and how else would I have seen the results?”

“You... you put cameras in my _house_?”

“I told you I’d be watching.”

His mocking tone somehow makes it worse. Her stomach turns at the knowledge that he saw her that night, that he sent that creature after her to test her. That he threatened what was hers, invaded her home just to prove a theory. That he probably watched her as she slept or changed clothes or made love. The smirk he gives her certainly seems to imply that. Fury roils in her gut at the thought.  

“Now,” he reaches back to pat the pocket holding the stone, “open the door, or–”

Twin bangs sound as the double doors burst open. Twenty or so people rush into the room, their guns drawn and ready, aiming at the robed men. They shout, demanding they get on their knees. Warren shoots to his feet, ordering the men to remain standing. As the monks start to drop to the floor, Alex’s view of the room clears.  

Leading the pack is Coralee, flanked by the same man and woman who accompanied them to the safe house last year. Near the back of the room, more of a surprise than Coralee, is Simon. He gives her a small wave before he’s lost in a sea of people as more flood through the doors. Alex remembers his promise, that they would keep Strand safe. And she knows he won’t be – none of them will – if she doesn’t do something about Warren.

Twisting back, she watches Strand tear his eyes from the scene to her. A sort of bewildered relief spreads across his features.   

It disappears in an instant when Alex grabs Warren’s ankle and yanks. He falls to the floor, twisting and kicking, but she holds fast, ignoring his threats as he demands she open the door.  

“All right,” she agrees.

The sigil burns at her skin. Sifting through the future as easily she would turn the pages of a book, she searches for somewhere she can take him, to insure he never hurts anyone again.  

Her eyes are fixed on Strand’s, though. She’s always loved that sharp mind of his. Except now it’s painful, watching the awareness light up his features, his eyes widening, his lips forming her name as he reaches for her.  

 _Trust me_ , she thinks, mouthing the words as she does.  

All she feels is the familiar tingle in her fingers, that rubber band snap at the back of her head as she goes, taking Warren with her.

 

\------

 

He reaches for her. His fingers brush the fabric of her coat, ready to grab hold of her, to keep her here. Because he sees that look, that trademark Alex Reagan expression, throwing her safety to the wind once again.

Except she’s gone.  

And suddenly, he’s sixteen again, standing in a hospital corridor, a sour-faced nurse taking him by the arm, and he knows what they’re going to say – _she passed away an hour ago_. He’s twenty-one, bouncing a crying Charlie in his arms, watching Inês pack up her campus apartment, swearing at him in Portuguese while he tries to reason with her, telling her not to go, and _I don’t think I can do this by myself_ , _please I know we can make it work_. He’s thirty-six, shouting at his teenage daughter, telling her _no you’re not leaving_ , _we have to stick together_ , _because I’m your father_ – to which she responds that she only has a mother, and that she’s dead now, and that she wishes it had been him because _Mom would’ve tried harder to find you, she would’ve never stopped looking_.   

He isn’t stupid. He’s connected it before, that his ability springs forth during times of immense stress. Because when Inês zipped up her suitcase, he saw her in the passenger seat of a crushed Fiat, her head split open from the impact. When his mother broke the news of her diagnosis, he saw her lying in a hospital bed, thin and pale and alone, as a nurse worked a tube out of her throat. When Coralee vanished, he saw the dark interior of a cargo van, illuminated only by the streaks of passing headlights that moved across the ceiling.   

He’s never been able to stop it. It’s not a gift, as Braun makes it out to be, not something magical, the way he can suddenly peel back the passage of time and take a peek. It’s a curse.

Because he can only see endings.

This time is no different.

For a moment, he sees fire. Scorched land, colorful stone buildings swallowed up by flame as it rolls down the streets, eating away at a bakery storefront, at overgrown flowers in a window box. Then there’s Alex, sitting at the water’s edge, the world on fire behind her, making its way toward her.   

A man – the one they met before, when Coralee saved them from Warren’s hand the first time – races up the stairs and over to Strand. He holds out a hand, flexing his fingers impatiently.  

“Come on, we have to go.”

“No, no, Alex–” Strand shakes his head, running a palm over the floor where the sigil was moments ago.

“Place is going to blow. We have to go,” the man growls. “ _Now_.”  

“No, you can’t!” He tears out of the man’s grip. “You can’t do that. She doesn’t – she’ll come back here, since I’m here.”

“Alex is smart, she’ll pick somewhere else to come back to.” It’s Coralee, her arm propped on the railing, her gun tucked into the holster at her side.

He’s overcome with unfamiliarity at the sight of her. Here is the woman who delighted him, who challenged him, who loved his daughter like she was her own. The woman who only took half-and-half in her coffee, who painstakingly collected every _Dr. Seuss_ book for Charlie’s eighth birthday, who insisted on never waking up before ten a.m. The woman who loved him (or did so as a dedication to the role she played in his life… he still isn’t sure).

She’s certainly a marvel on how he looked at her all his life and never saw the person that hid underneath.

Over her shoulder, her people are rounding up the monks and taking them out the double doors, others running around and barking demands at the technicians, asking about the machines. But standing just behind her is the answer to his problem.   

“Simon!” he calls out, signaling for him.  

The boy shares a look with Coralee, who rolls her eyes, but steps back to let him up the stairs.  

“You can bilocate,” Strand says.

Simon seems to consider the statement, then nods. “Yeah.”

“I need you to help me find Alex. She said – when she talked with you, you told her that she shouldn’t travel more than twice in one day, right?”

“She went three times,” Simon tells him.  

“Yes, I know. Which means I need your help to bring her back. You can do that.”

“I... don’t think I can.”

Jumping to his feet, he closes the distance between them to lay his hands on Simon’s shoulders. “She’s in danger. Wherever she took Warren, it... something’s wrong. And if she comes straight back here, she’ll be in even more danger. So, I need you to help me, okay?”  

“Okay.”

“She told me about the Sumerian, that it lets you... see things.”

“Yeah.”

“So, I need you to look and see where and when she went.”  

“Richard, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for–”  

Ignoring Coralee, he rushes over to one of the tables, shoving the files to the floor as he searches for a marker. He brings one back over to Simon, uncapping it and pushing it into his grip.  

“Find her. Please.”

Simon kneels on the floor and draws the harsh lines of the pentagram. After encircling it twice, he draws the Sumerian cuneiform outward from the circles. Some of it Strand recognizes from his and Alex’s extensive research into the subject. There are several repetitions of _munus_ , for woman, and a _ki_ , for earth. Once the surrounding air is thick with the marker’s smell, Simon sets his hand in the center of the images, and closes his eyes.  

Then immediately pulls back and shakes his head.

“What?” Strand asks dumbly. “What is it?”

“She’s gone.”

“What do you – what does that mean?” Without giving the boy a chance to answer, Strand holds up his hand. “It doesn’t matter. You know where she is.”

“Yeah.”

“Then go get her.”

“I can’t.”

High above them, a series of bangs rattle the building. The lights rattle and sway. The framework encasing them groans at the movement.  

“We have to leave. Now,” Coralee orders, signaling to the man on the platform with her. He steps up behind Strand and pushes him toward the stairs.  

“No!” He skirts away from the man, rounding back to where Simon still kneels. “No, you have to get her. You don’t understand: she’s going to die. I’ll go with you – I know I’m not supposed to, but I have to. I can’t lose her.”

Simon gazes up at him from the floor with pity. “She went into time. She’s stuck and you saw her die. I’m sorry.”

Strand immediately thinks of the dream, of the darkness wrapping itself around Alex, of the heat in her eyes.

“No, no, stop – don't, I need you to focus on when she went. The day, the year.” At his insistence, Simon runs his fingers over the symbols again and nods his head. “Okay. Okay, take us there.”

“I told you: I can’t. I can’t bilocate like she can.”

Strand blanches at the words.  

He’s back in that canyon, watching Alex’s hand slip from his, watching her go under the dark water. Knows that it can’t be the last he’ll ever see of her as he pushes himself to scale the wall, to risk the storm above as he sprints across the ground, searching that churning water below for any sign of her.  

“Richard, let’s go!” Coralee yells.  

“Doctor Strand, I’m sorry...” Simon mumbles.  

The room falls away. He’s looking up at the cracked façade of a building, at a dirty overhang above a café, at flowering vines pouring out into the street.  

 _Alex_ , he thinks.

Then he’s standing on a shore, the blue of the water and the gray of the sky melting at the farthest point, where the horizon forms a neat seam, the earth tucking in on itself like a blanket. It is, like all things great and precious, a lonely sight. Squinting, he scans every inch of visible space, waiting for a sign of life, for that flash of light in the fog that clings atop the water.  

There’s a brief tug at his hand. He looks down to see a rope looped around his wrist. Following the line of it, he watches as it floats atop the waves. Then the rope tightens, pulling taut enough that he can trace the line of it as it disappears into the fog, before it collapses against the water once more.    

 _Alex_ , he thinks again.  

Of her curiosity as it fills her gaze; of her tenacity as she keeps leaving him voicemails, keeps knocking on doors, keeps digging for the truth; of her hand in his as she shakes it twice; of her fingers touching the rows of his tapes, his countertop, his arm, his hand, his lips; her voice, her podcast one and her storytelling one and her late night one, calling for her dog or chuckling at his bad jokes or mocking someone on Twitter or saying his name, that beautiful, phonic evolution of Doctor Strand to Strand to Richard.  

The rope tightens again. There, on the farthest edge: a sailboat. Harsh winds rip across the water, puffing out its sails.  

 _Alex_ , he thinks, and the rope tugs once more.  

Out in the water, a flame flickers to life. At first, he thinks it’s lightning, announcing the arrival of a storm as faint rumbles shake the earth below his feet. Then the fog rolls back and he can see the flames. They lick at the boat, shooting up the mast and engulfing the sails.  

Strand seizes the rope and pulls, trying in vain to bring the boat to shore, but for as much rope lays at his feet, the boat never moves. Looping it around his wrist again, he keeps a tight hold on it as he rushes forward into the waves. He dives under the breakers, pushing off the bottom and breaking the surface. No longer able to see the boat due to the waves, he uses the rope to guide him out into the open water.  

The rope tightens once, then again, but still he swims, exhaustion pulling at him as he fights against the waves. Every few seconds he calls out for Alex. The only thing he can hear in return is the roar of the approaching storm.  

Then a wave pushes him up, far enough above the water that he can finally see the boat. A cold bite of panic snaps through him.  

The boat is sinking. The bow is the only part visible, sticking up out of the water.  

He shouts for Alex, tugging desperately at the rope, as the bow slips under the waves. Thunder cracks above him as arms cinch around his middle.  

“We’re leaving!” someone shouts and then he’s being hoisted up and over someone’s shoulder, his body protesting, his blood pooling down into his head.   

“I’m sorry, Doctor Strand,” someone keeps repeating, barely distinguishable from the cacophony of noises around them. “I liked her a lot, too.”

A wave crashes over his head, driving him under the water, away from the storm above. In the distance, he can see the white gleam of the boat as it sinks further into the depths, before it’s swallowed up, disappearing from view.  

The rope tugs at his wrist, the knot unraveling. His lungs beg him to surface, but he refuses, seizing the frayed ends, hoping that if he holds on just a bit longer–

 _Go_ , Alex tells him.

Helpless, he unties the rope from his wrist and lets go, watching until the end is swallowed up by the black water.   

 _Go_ , Alex tells him again.

 

 

He goes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terms / allusions / general things:  
> Akkadian translations: _elû_ \- to rise / _warû_ \- to guide or to lead / _lamadu_ \- to teach / _magana_ \- now  
> Azag - In the Sumerian mythological poem _Lugal-e_ , Azag is a monstrous demon, supposedly so ugly that his presence alone causes fish to boil alive in rivers.


	14. Chapter 14

They tumble out onto a street.  

Alex manages to catch herself, her palms smarting on the cobblestones. Warren isn’t so lucky. He lands on his side, groaning at the impact. Buildings surround them, their staggered balconies floating out above their heads. Pinned to rusted clotheslines, laundry rustles in the warm breeze. Clothes and towels are scattered along the street, having been torn from their homes by the wind.  

No one is here to bother retrieving them.  

The streets are deserted. The cafés and shops are closed up; their woven awnings, once colored bright blue and deep green and flashy red, are coated in ash. Plastic tables and chairs set up for the dinner rush are just as filthy.  

Through the thin strip of daylight between the buildings, the sky is full of a filmy, yellowed smog. A siren wails in the distance, pausing every fifteen seconds to play a pre-recorded message, warning the abandoned city of the imminent threat.  

Or, Alex assumes so. She’s never had much of an ear for Italian.  

“Where did you take us?” Warren struggles to his feet, using a stack of pallets to support him.

“We’re in Naples, Italy,” she informs him. “A few thousand years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted fifteen miles east, killing thousands. But you already knew that. You’re a student of history, aren’t you?”  

“You fucking bitch,” he hisses, pushing off the pallets to come after her. He only makes it a few steps before he collapses, clutching his head. Leaning forward, he dry heaves in between his growled threats. “ _When_ are we, then?”

“2097. The when isn’t important, though. It’s what happens that is.”

He manages the best glare that he’s able to, trying in vain to fish the stone out of his pocket.

“The next eruption is in a few hours. It’s going to wipe out most of southwestern Italy. The residents evacuated weeks ago, but the death toll will still be close to eight-thousand. People who refused to leave. People who were still too close to the fallout.” Alex tilts her head, mocking him. “And you.”

Shooting to his feet, he closes the distance between them in a second – faster than she thought possible – and shoves her against the wall. One hand curled around her throat, he brings the stone out with the other and starts to speak to it, calling for a demon.  

Alex brings her knee up between his legs. He crumples to the street. The stone falls from his grip and rolls a safe distance away.  

“You wouldn’t leave me here to die,” he chokes out.

“I will,” she promises. “But I want you to know something first, before I do. That this is your fault.” Picking up a piece of wood that’s broken off a pallet, he shouts in pain as Alex drives it into his side. “For invading my privacy. For trying to offer me up to the demon of your choice.” Easily avoiding his poor attempt at knocking her legs out from under her, she strikes again. “For threatening my loved ones.”

He cries out, collapsing back to the ground as pain wracks his frame. Crouching down to pick up the stone, Alex slips it into her pocket, trying to ignore the heat emanating from it.  

She pulls out the marker and draws her door home.  

“I’m not the only one,” he taunts. “There are others out there. Those who are prepared to make the same decisions I did. You’re cutting the head off of one snake. Rest assured another will grow in my place.”  

“Then I’ll keep my knife sharp,” she says, pressing her hand to the sigil.  

Nothing happens.

Her heartbeat increases tenfold as she traces the lines again and lays her palm flat against the building. The residual energy from the sigil sparks through her veins, but she feels no pull, no tightening in her belly that usually comes with an open door. Blood trickles out of her nose and dots her shirt as she smacks at the brick, then pounds her fist against it, her skin breaking open and leaving bloody smudges on the wall.

Tears well in her eyes as she comes to the horrifying realization that she overtaxed her ability. And now she’s stuck.

From behind her, Warren laughs.  

Anger flashes through her, a course of lightning to her veins. The board is at her side one moment and then driving into his head the next. His whine of agony sharpens when she crouches in front of him and lifts him up by his hair, her grip shaking from the rage within her.  

A mixture of blood and spit drips from the corner of his mouth as he meets her gaze and chuckles again.  

“What will poor Richard think when you don’t come back?”

“He knows.”  

She’s sure of it. It was written across his face when he saw her grab Warren, when he saw the apology in her eyes. She thought she’d deal with the fallout of her disappearance when she got back.  

Now, she won’t have to, because she won’t see him ever again. Biting at her lip, Alex wills the tears to stop – at least until she’s alone. Realizing that she doesn’t want to give the man beneath her any more of her short time left, she drops his head back down to the street. She takes out the marker and draws a long slash through the sigil, as Tannis instructed her to do, to lock the door back. It glows once before it fades from sight.    

Warren calls after her as she walks away, taunting her with the knowledge of her upcoming demise. Reaching the corner, she takes the first right and continues walking, until his voice fades under the noise of the sirens, and she can hear him no more.

 

\------

 

The smoke grows thicker the closer she gets to the bay. Here there is more evidence of society’s departure. Wisteria hangs down from window boxes and trellises, winding its way down gutters and onto the streets. Cars sit, empty and locked, covered in a thin film of dirt and ash. A few are unlocked, but she can’t find any keys and she didn’t have a rebellious-enough childhood to know how to hotwire a car. Besides, even if she got it running, there’s no way she would make it out of the fallout zone in time.  

A proper two-lane road finally leads to a six-lane highway. Without a single car in sight, she opts to walks down the middle, hopping the barrier to continue south. Her only goal in mind is to get to the bay. If she’s going to die to a volcanic explosion, she at least wants a front-row seat on her death bed.  

She passes through the Piazza del Plebiscito, which she recognizes from Strand’s photos he sent her of his trip to Italy last year. For a long while, she sits in the middle of the abandoned square, the historic buildings all shuttered up around her, prepared for their end. She sobs into her coat, remembering how he’d talked about wanting to take her here someday.  

But she pushes on.

The grass in the Molosiglio Gardens is waist-high, having been left to grow. Clusters of purple violets peek out alongside the path. Rats scurry here and there, the only animals she’s come across on her journey. Everything else has fled north to safety.  

Despite the ominous smoke in the sky, the bay still glitters from what sunlight seeps through. The water is a deep, piercing blue that she’s only seen in Strand’s pictures. The endless rows of masts that were in his photos are gone, though. The harbor sits empty.  

Harsh concrete lines of the port break up the view, so she continues on down. Past the shuttered port buildings and past the lighthouse to where the pathway ends, where she plops down and swings her legs over the edge. The water knocks up against the rocks, spraying her with a gentle mist.  

To the east, Mount Vesuvius is a dark stain against the hazy sky.  

Drawing her knees up to her chest, she starts to loop her arm around them before she feels her recorder in her pocket. Along with the stone. Retrieving them both, she holds the stone up, turning it to see the two white bands that glow despite the weak sunlight.  

Cocking her arm back, she chucks it into the bay. The stone fades from sight before she sees it hit the water, but she lets out the breath she’s been holding, knowing it’s at the bottom of the sea.    

Switching on the recorder, she falls into the comforting rhythm of narration.  

“Welcome back to the Black Tapes Podcast. This is your host, Alex Reagan, who is stuck at the wrong end of time and is – I’m...” she sucks in a sharp breath, her voice catching as she continues, “...I’m about to die. So. Here we are. I fucked up. Not going to bother to censor myself because it... doesn’t really matter.”

She does what she’s best at: she talks.  

About what’s happened since the last recording session (a lot), about what she sees, what the future is like (the short amount she’s experiencing until it all ends in a fiery explosion), about what she would like to tell her loved ones, what songs she’d like them to play at her memorial service. If they even have one for her, if they don’t spend their entire lives waiting for her to come back; she has to put the recorder down for a few minutes when she comes to that realization.  

If she can appreciate nothing else, it’s that the sun setting over open water never becomes dull. It could be a hundred years ago, her and her dad and her brother out on the boat, waiting for the fish to bite. She can taste the bologna sandwiches her dad packed and she can feel the cold water at her toes, think of how it’s so mysterious down there where the water meets the shadows. And it’s like there’s no end down there, the water endless, and she could swim to the other side if she could hold her breath long enough. Perry would splash her and call her stupid for thinking those things because _there has to be a bottom, what else would we anchor to?_ And then she would float on her back and close her eyes against the sun as she lets her body drift downwards, until she’s just a head above water, existing in two different states of matter.  

Then Perry would sneak up and dunk her underwater and Dad would call them back onto the boat before they drown each other.  

Alex blinks her eyes open, unaware she closed them while she relayed the memory to the recorder.  

“I want to go home,” she admits, her voice cracking around the words. “I was stupid, letting my anger control my actions. When I glimpsed into the future, I was only looking for revenge, for Warren to experience as much pain as possible for what he put me through.”  

On the horizon, the last of the sun sinks into the water. The empty city behind her dims, fading into the approaching darkness. An ocean breeze drifts up from the southwest, whistling through the wooden boards that cover the port’s buildings. It's the death rattle of a city on the edge of extinction.   

“If... I know no one will hear this, but if someone – anyone – does, I want it to be you, Richard. Well, preferably Nic first so he can censor all of the swears if it goes live.” She gives a half-hearted chuckle, sighing at the end of it. “Italy is just as beautiful as you said it was. And I saw it with all of the fountains turned off. And all the restaurants closed. And all the people gone. I’m sorry that we won’t ever get to go together. And I’m sorry that another woman you love has up and vanished on you. I... had a good reason for it. If it makes any difference. It... probably doesn’t, though.

“When we were in the car, before... you wanted me to go with you, to get away and lie low for a while. I said no. But I wanted to say yes. I wanted you to turn the car around. I wanted to ignore all of the world with you, have you make us dinner while I do the only cooking I’m good at – by which I mean opening a bottle of wine.”  

Brushing the tears from her cheeks, she hunkers down from another gust of wind. At her sudden movement, the marker in her coat pocket rolls out onto the concrete. Grabbing it before it can tumble into the rocks below, she uncaps it and idly draws with what little light she has left.  

“Then we would have gone upstairs, and I would’ve lit the fireplace you never use and we would’ve made love with only it for light. I’ve never told you how handsome you look in firelight. It’s a shame, because you do. And then we would wake up and drive to the airport and would just...” she draws in another ragged breath, trying to hold all of it in, needing to make it to the end of what she wants to say. “Go. To anywhere. Maybe here, to Italy. Or to South Africa or maybe Belgium or Norway or Thailand. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. We would go. Together.”   

The marker stops moving. She looks down, surprised to see she’s drawn a sigil while she talked. Curious, she puts her palm to it. A tingling sensation shoots up her arm, but this time, the sigil is more receptive.

Because she left a door open somewhere.

Desperation surges within her as she pushes. But something is on the other side, like a weight that’s holding the door closed.  

The ground starts to tremble. The rocks below her tumble out into the water, the concrete underneath her splits apart. Black smoke billows from the volcano, darker than the lingering haze.  

Alex keeps her hand against the drawing, desperate with how much she wants it to work. It’s like digging up a lost memory, or a word just on the tip of the tongue, or hearing the first few bars of a song and trying to guess the name. Her nails dig into the shaking concrete. She sees the door’s edge in her mind, feels that comforting knowledge of home.  

She remembers being young and watching Dorothy tap her red shoes together and beg to go home. Back when she was still Alex Doe and didn’t understand why someone would want to go home that badly – it wasn’t that great of a place, in young Alex’s opinion.  

She understands now.

Behind her eyelids, the world flashes bright as an intense heat scorches across the city.  

She’s back at the lake, but this time she’s swimming up, back to the surface and away from the dark depths, up to the safety and warmth of the sun. She can see it up above, sparkling through the ripples, growing bigger, expanding until it’s all she can see. Reaching up, her hand breaks the surface, warmth flooding through her fingertips. Under her hand, the door finally opens, calling her across time to come home.

And so, she does.

 

\------

 

The basement is clean.  

It’s the first thing Alex notices as she steps onto the worn carpet. The boxes of tapes, usually stacked high on the sofa and coffee table, are gone. As are the perilous towers of books that litter the floor and buffet table at any given time.  

If Strand ever bothered to dust down here, she would worry about the layer of it that currently rests across the shelves and tables, but his steadfast tidying never seemed to make it to the basement.  

There’s also the issue of the music. It’s loud, so loud that Alex can hear every lyric coming through the floor above. The beat reminds her of something the interns would listen to, something catchy and auto-tuned. She hesitates on the first stair at the unfamiliar tune.  

What if it isn’t Strand? What if he sold the house and moved back to Chicago? What if she messed up the return and it’s been years and he’s moved on? Can she go back and try again?  

Pushing those worrisome thoughts to the side, she takes a deep breath and climbs the stairs. The music is even louder, now, as she steps out into the hallway. She follows the noise to the living room, brought to a halt when she sees it.  

It’s a mess.

Papers are tacked to every wall with tape or thumbtacks. Artwork that once hung on the walls has been dumped into a corner. The boxes from the basement seem to have migrated up here and multiplied; they cover the tables and the floor and the hearth. Joining them are folders stuffed to the brim with loose-leaf paper that teeter off the edge of every surface. Takeout containers and pizza boxes perch atop the boxes, or peek out from under the couch, or decorate the mantle. Thin walkways have been carved out of the debris, snaking over to the couch and armchair; another leads to the front door and across, to the hallway. A map of western Italy stretches across the far wall, covering the front windows. More papers are tacked to the map, some appearing to be copies of textbooks, others scribbled notes.  

Hovering in front of it is Strand. His back is to her as he traces a line across the map in pencil. His hair is tipped with water, the neckline of the shirt he wears damp. That familiar flannel – his Unabomber couture – is draped over the armchair.      

On the couch is Simon, eating a slice of pizza and petting Relay as he dozes beside him. His head bobs to the beat of the music. Then, as if sensing her presence, he twists to look back at the doorway. He gives her a little wave with the pizza slice.  

“Hey, Alex,” Simon greets as he leans over to switch the music off.  

Strand mutters something to himself as he bends to grab a folder, splaying it open across his arm. He turns back to Simon, his eyes on the file.

“Can you reach out to the woman from Haiti again? I might have–” The file in his hand tumbles to the ground, papers flying in every direction. Under the overhead light, his face pales, his blue eyes widening behind his glasses. “Alex.”

There’s a whole world of heartache behind her name.  

“Richard, how long have–”  

He moves, shoving aside the piles of research, and crosses the room to crush her against him, nearly knocking her to the floor. Wrapping her arms around him, she feels the frantic rattle of his breathing against her cheek.   

He can’t stop saying her name.  

“I’m here,” she whispers, squeezing him tighter in case her words aren’t enough. His shaking fingers card through her hair, as if to confirm her assurances. “I’m here.”

He nods, dropping a kiss to the crown of her head where she’s tucked against his chest. The familiarity of the sensation brings tears, hot and quick. “I must have messed up something with the return. It got...” she bites her lip, trying to keep more tears from spilling over, “...bad. Near the end. How long was I gone?”

Strand pulls back, cradling her face in his hands. His thumbs sweep across her cheeks, brushing away the paths of her tears. Leaning close, he presses a kiss to her forehead, then down to the bridge of her nose. Relief swims in his glassy eyes as he pulls back to meet her gaze.

“Fifty-seven days,” he answers her, his voice gone rough. Tears carve down his cheeks and into his beard. “I thought I lost you.”  

Overwhelmed with understanding exactly how he felt, she leans into his touch and wraps her hand around his.  

“I’m here, Richard.”

A flurry of barks sound from behind her, shortly followed by a barreling ball of fur knocking into the back of her legs. Alex steps back to let Relay jump on her, wrapping him in a hug as he whines and yaps at her, telling her off for being gone for so long. She soothes him with murmured reassurances and ear scratches, pleased when he seems satisfied enough to move over to Strand and then back to Simon.  

“We’ve been looking for you,” Simon tells her. “Doctor Strand here – he's been figuring out where you ended up, and I’ve been contacting others like us to go get you.”

She looks to Strand, who nods.  

“Ruby’s been helping when she can, as have Nic and Amalia. But it’s been a slow process. Simon figured out _when_ you went, but tracking down where was proving to be... difficult.” He wipes at his eyes underneath his glasses. “The two people we managed to track down weren’t willing to go unless I could figure out exactly where you were in the city, given the... impending disaster.”

“Wait.” She holds up a hand, pressing it to his chest. “How did you–”

“I saw... things. Right after you went through the door.”

Immediately, she thinks of Bobby Mames, of the stream a hundred yards from the main stem, near a field – the things a teenage Richard couldn’t possibly know, but did.  

“Things.”

Even now, he squirms a bit, still uncomfortable with the possibility of it.  

“Yes.”

Reaching down, she takes his hand and links their fingers together, running her thumb across his skin. His shoulders loosen, his body settling at her touch.  

“What kinds of things?”

“I saw what happened.” There’s a heavy weight chained to those words that he tries to clear away. “But, more importantly, once I had the chance to go over what I’d seen, I realized that I recognized some of the streets and the landmarks. I just had to narrow down which part of the bay you went to. I... knew you’d go to the water.”  

Alex squeezes his hand tighter for a beat, pleased when he responds in kind, tugging her close to press his lips to her temple.

“I went to the port. I, um, I actually still had my recorder.” She pulls it from her pocket, then stops, realizing that she doesn’t want to play it now. Not when she realizes what’s on it – what she thought would be her last words.   

Then, at the sight of it in her hand, a switch flips in her brain and all of the questions start tumbling out: “Wait, what happened at Daiva Corp? And the Ceonophus? Is Coralee all right?”

Strand sighs, but his mouth curls to one side as he casts a look over her.  

“Are you sure you don’t want to rest first? It’s a long story.”  

“I have time,” she assures him, urging him towards the kitchen, towards neutral territory that somehow avoided the disaster of the living room.  

“And we have pizza,” Simon chimes in, bringing up the rear, lifting the pizza box above his head so Relay doesn’t try for it.  

“And pizza,” Alex echoes.

“All right. As long as you’re–”

“I’m okay, Richard. Really.”

“Good.”

“And you. Are you okay?”

“Yes. I am now.”

“Good.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus concludes the actual, proper story -- a short epilogue will be posted next week, which will officially wrap things up. 
> 
> Terms / allusions / general nonsense:   
> None that I can think of, but did I rip that 'student of history' line from Uncharted 2? The answer is, of course, yes.


	15. Epilogue

 

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah, anywhere works.”  

At Alex’s vague hand gesture, Strand sets the cooler down next to the bench seat and pushes it into the corner, moving it out of the way. He retrieves their bags from the dock, along with the last of the groceries. Busying himself putting the food away below deck, he isn’t surprised when only another minute passes before the engines hum to life.  

They’re already a quarter of the way from the marina when he climbs back out onto the bridge. Late March’s storm clouds that drenched the city early this morning are already rolling on to the east. Traffic isn’t too bad out on the water. The Bremerton ferry is a large, white dot on the southern horizon, inching behind the pointed tip of Bainbridge Island. The mountain is out, its snow-capped peak winking at them between the passing clouds.  

Their route will take them north, with an overnight stop at Point No Point and up through the sound, to another stop in Port Townsend Bay. Then up they’ll go into the wide, open channel of the Salish Sea. Their destination is Friday Harbor, just off the eastern coast of San Juan Island.

Alex sits at the helm, a pair of mirrored sunglasses hanging from the collar of his Yale sweatshirt, her ponytail whipping in the wind. He watches as she drops the speed to guide them over a passing boat’s wake, the chrome wheel shining in her hands as she turns them farther north. Her socked feet tap along to Glenn Frey’s voice as it blares from the speakers.  

“Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me how to drive this thing?” he asks, after she turns the music down enough to hear him. He means it as a joke, but then she’s hopping up to shove him down into the captain’s chair, and suddenly he’s guiding them out past Fourmile Rock.  

The city eases from sight until it disappears behind the outer cliffs, until it’s only them and the glittering expanse of the sound.

Shifting her stance with the boat’s movement, Alex rolls her eyes at his poor joke about her sea legs. She points out dark flashes in the water that might be tree branches, shows him how to angle the boat to cross a wake (which he does properly the second time – the first time Alex ends up stumbling back into the bench seat when their boat smacks down too hard onto the water).  

They leave what little traffic there is behind in Shilshole Bay and continue northward. Alex’s arm is a comforting weight across his shoulders, her hip nudging at his side, her fingers tapping out the beat against his sweater.

It overwhelms him, sometimes, the places she’s carved for herself into his life. For almost two months, there was a gaping hole where she should’ve been, having whisked herself away on some foolish notion that her life was worth Warren’s being extinguished.  

They’d argued about that.

They’d argued about a lot of things upon her return: when she demanded that she take up the search on Daiva Corporation’s other subsidiaries, after Warren’s threat about there being others out there. When she jumped straight back into work and nearly passed out behind the wheel after a near thirty-two-hour stint of no sleep, during the week he was back in Chicago to take care of everything he’d neglected.  

Then, after several nights spent on opposite sides of the same city with only the knowledge of her absence for company, he drove to her house. Where he met her on the front porch, her keys in hand to head to his. And she brought him inside and played the recording for him – her last words, spoken to him, knowing he’d never hear them.

They were difficult to listen to, but they were the much-needed wake-up call for both of them. If they were going to tackle this investigation into Warren’s organization and the rest of the black tapes, if they were going to continue their relationship and partnership, they needed to go about it how that doomed woman sitting alone at the end of the world would have wanted: together.

A sudden trilling noise interrupts the peaceful moment, and Strand finds that he misses her touch, even when she moves away to pull her phone from her pocket.   

“Nic’s sending me photos of Relay. He already misses us.” She shows him her phone, as if he requires proof.  

“He’s eating trash because he misses us?”

“It’s an animal thing.” Bending down beside him, she snaps a photo of the two of them to send in reply. “You would know what I’m talking about if you owned one. Speaking of which, you should get a cat.”

“I don’t see the need when I practically have a dog six out of seven days of the week.”

There’s a brief pause as she taps out a caption and sends it off.

“What if we got a cat?”

He tries to keep his attention on the route ahead.

“Implying that this hypothetical cat would live with both of us, at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“I... wouldn’t be opposed to such a cat, then.”

“Good.” Her arm returns to its place on his shoulder. All seems very right with the world, as he looks out upon the water.  

“But just so you know, you’re not naming it after anything paranormal.”

“I don’t know. I think I could talk you into a few of them.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“How about Salem?”

“No.”

“I know: Bilo.”

“How is that–”

“Because it’s short for Bilocat. Get it?” At his answering groan, she makes a show of tapping her chin in thought. “Hmm, okay, too on the nose. How about Endora?”

“I did watch _Bewitched_ as a child, you know. And again: no.”

“Sasquatch! But we call her Sassy for short.”

“Alex,” he scoffs, though it develops into that familiar chuckle.

“Okay, what about Pheeney? And people think it’s a reference to Mr. Feeny from _Boy Meets World_ , but it’s for your favorite word.”

“I have no idea what boy you’re talking about. And I don’t use that word as much as you or your audience seem to think.”

Alex hums.

“I don’t know... I’d hold your tongue on that one. One of the listeners made a super-cut and it’s _pretty_ long.”

“All right, all right, I acquiesce. Not to interrupt your clever suggestions, but where do I go from here?”

“Oh – sorry. Do you want me to take over? I don’t want to wear you out.”

“No, I’m fine.” He pauses, then leans over to drop a kiss to her shoulder and adds, “Besides, there will be time for that later.”

“It’s a good thing I love you, despite your childish sense in humor.”

“I thought you’d like that one.”

“I mean, I did. But – okay, if you’re fine with driving some more, we're going to bear north-northwest here. You’ll want to keep out of the middle.”

“This will take us straight up the sound, right?”

“Yep.”  

“Then let’s go.”

 

 

And so, they do.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we arrive at the end, where I have to be suave with my end note and not act like the big ol' pile of emotions that I currently am. A big thank you to all the comments and kudos and, honestly, just the fact that you read the whole damn thing.   
> So, thanks again! I hope y'all enjoyed it.


End file.
